What this guide is not

This guide is not, and makes no attempt to be, the ultimate authority on disability reporting. Indeed, one of the points I hope to get across is that there is no ultimate authority on anything related to disability. And there’s no one approach you can take that will guarantee you’ll never offend anybody ever. If nothing else, disabled people are different from one another and there is no single opinion from the “disability community”; disabled people don’t think in lockstep on any issue. There is no single “disability perspective” on anything.

That means this guide doesn’t endorse or stand against any political party. Rights-based movements, such as the disability-rights movement and the disability-justice movement (see Glossary), are by their very nature progressive. One of the aims of this guide is to introduce journalists, who may or may not be familiar with the landscape, to these movements and their antecedents. But this project is not as concerned with locating disability along a traditional left–right political axis. Indeed, one of the biggest failures of media reporting on disability politics has involved the assumption that “the disabled community” is the rightful constituency of one political party or another — that disabled people will, for example, vote for liberal or Liberal candidates because “diversity issues” are the domain of left or centre-left parties. Then there’s also the reasonably common assumption that opposition to legislation about medical assistance in dying or to the termination of pregnancies of disabled fetuses must spring from religious, and possibly ultra-conservative, beliefs.

Disability issues seem to have a way of defying traditional political categorization. Two of the most well-known advocates for the legalization of assisted dying here in Canada were the NDP’s Svend Robinson — Canada’s first-ever openly gay MP — and Conservative Steven Fletcher, a federal minister of health who later ran for the People’s Party.[1] South of the border, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had strong bipartisan support when Republican President George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990 (see Annex: Notable legislation and legal cases).

Disability transcends partisan politics, but it can also be illegible to it. Every disability organization in Ontario speaks about Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution as a disaster for disabled Ontarians due to draconian cuts to social assistance and services. While subsequent governments of all political stripes have raised social-assistance rates, they have not been raised anywhere near enough to make up for the increase in inflation: recipients are actually worse off in terms of purchasing power and access to meet basic needs than they were under Harris.[2] In 2024, Premier Doug Ford became the first Conservative premier since Bill Davis to raise Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) rates.[3]

Very few ODSP recipients ever leave the program. They don’t fit into, for example, former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s vision of “the middle class and those working hard to join it.”[4] Disabled people are more likely to be considered a burden in the public than a constituency to serve, and the media often shamelessly adopts that framing.

Although media coverage of social assistance has highlighted the increasingly desperate circumstances of ODSP recipients — and may have contributed to the Ford government’s change of heart on this file (one of the government’s first acts in 2018 was to reverse most of the increases planned by the Kathleen Wynne government[5]) — coverage of disabled-policy activism still tends to be reductive, relying on images of disabled people as either helpless suffering victims or as out-of-touch elites who don’t actually understand the struggles faced by “real” disabled people (who are presumed not to take the position that these particular disability activists are taking).

Thus, one of my principal aims in this guide is to render certain positions that may seem extreme at first glance understandable by placing them in their political and social context.

Have you ever wondered why disability activists say that a policy, such as the dropping of mask mandates in health-care settings or schools, is “eugenics”? This guide explains not only what eugenics is but also how and why these policies are related to it and what it means to make that claim.[6] Have you ever heard a commentator say with consternation that “people don’t want to get treatment for autism” and wonder why on Earth that would be the case? [7] This guide talks about what that means.[8]

You don’t necessarily have to agree or disagree with any particular contention in order to cover disability effectively, but we do think you should understand where they come from and why. Otherwise, you run the risk of misrepresentation or sensationalism. As this guide itself will show, some issues have always been sites of deep controversy and pain within and between disabled communities, so we can hardly advance one representative position in this work.

And we can’t cover everything. This guide isn’t comprehensive. Because TVO is an organization based in Ontario whose mandate is to provide educational and public-service content to the people of Ontario, the examples in this style guide are heavily weighted toward coverage of this province, with much of the rest coming from other provinces, the United States, and the United Kingdom. There are many disability communities and vibrant activist movements all over the world, and although this guide makes an effort to incorporate them, they’re not the context with which I am most familiar.

Thankfully, this guide is not the final word. One of the reasons my colleagues and I proposed a digital version of these materials instead of a print book is so that we could update it as news breaks, linguistic and social mores evolve, legislation changes and priorities shift. If you look at this work and your thought is, “This doesn’t represent the experience of disability as I understand it at all; I or my organization could produce a far better guide,” thank goodness. I would love nothing more than for this guide to be one resource among many. But in Canada right now, we don’t even have one.

Over the course of this project, my colleagues and I have often been overwhelmed by the amount of information we have to impart. It has seemed impossible to include everything that could possibly be relevant. (And that’s because it is; anything that tried would be thousands of pages long, require expertise in basically every academic discipline, and be so in-depth that it would cease to be of any practical use. Also, we would be dead before we could complete it.) We’ve reminded ourselves that any resource we make will represent an improvement on the status quo. This guide is a start; it was never intended to be the end.

And we hope future versions will include you. We welcome feedback, dialogue and constructive criticism. The authors, editors and consultants for this project are disabled, but none of us makes any claim to be a spokesperson for even our own specific disabilities. If you think we’re missing something or got it wrong, please let us know! We are committed to upholding journalistic integrity, and part of that is accountability for mistakes.

That being said, this guide is not objective in the sense most journalists understand that term. It makes no claim to the traditional journalistic “view from nowhere.” It is written and edited by disabled people, for the benefit of disabled people. Although the people who will use it are, by and large, media professionals, who may or may not be disabled, its goal is for those media professionals to use it to correct the consequences of flat, simplistic, misleading, biased, condescending, narrow and sometimes downright false media coverage. This guide will doubtless receive accusations of bias, which I will cheerfully accept. It is biased toward disabled people in all our human complexity. Its political agenda is to see media cover disabled people as full human beings and citizens, worthy of the same dignity and respect as all other people and of being held to the same standard of scrutiny. Journalists’ job is to tell the truth without fear or favour, and when it comes to disability, we have failed. It is past time to rectify this. Nothing else is acceptable.

Finally, I wanted to say a few words to those disabled journalists reading this guide (and those journalists who have not come to know themselves as disabled but may recognize themselves in these pages. If that’s you, welcome. We have heating pads, snacks, speech-to-text software and internet-blocking apps). You belong in the newsroom, in the field, at the press conference and in the studio. You have skills that those who doubt you never will. You know how to adapt, how to work a problem, how to keep yourself safe in a hostile environment, how to keep going with fewer resources than you thought you would have. You learn about complex policies as a matter of survival. You know how to explain complex needs to able-bodied people, because you have to do it every day. Journalism needs you — for disability stories and for anything else you want to cover.

If you’re in a newsroom, you’ve probably been called upon to “educate” your colleagues, whether you like it or not. I hope this guide can be of use when your colleagues say, “We probably don’t need a transcript, right?” (Wrong.) Or when you have to explain why the federal government doesn’t have jurisdiction over provincial social-assistance rates. Or why long COVID clinics using cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exercise therapy set off alarm bells or why captions and an on-screen sign-language interpreter are not the same or, or, or…. Give your colleagues this guide, and get back to journalism. And please reach out with your thoughts. I wrote this, most of all, for us — not to use, but to help our non-disabled colleagues share the load.