Employment, Labour & Equalities Law Webinar Series | Making sure you're AODA compliant

Elisa: Good morning, everyone. I'll think we'll get started. My name is Elisa Scali. I am a partner with Gowling WLG, practicing in the Ottawa office as part of the Employment, Labour and Equities group. I'd like to welcome you this morning to the first of our 6-part webinar series on employment law. As you know today's topic will focus on ensuring that you have all the information you need to be compliant with the AODA filing deadline which is coming up at the end of June.

Our speakers today are Neena Gupta and Shefali Rajaputra. Neena is a partner in the Gowling WLG Waterloo office where she has a broad employment and human rights practice. She is the firm's go to for all AODA matters. She's known for her pragmatic and plain language approach to complex legal issues. She's also the Chair for our Diversity and Inclusion Council. She's been repeatedly recognized by Lexpert and Best Lawyers for her excellence in employment and human rights law. I'm sure many of you have heard her speak before because she's a very popular and informative speaker on a variety of topics. She's also a published author on matters relating to employment contracts, wrongful dismissal and human rights investigations. Neena is a mother of a wonderful teenager and she's also the grandmother to a 500 kilo horse, whom she considers her fur-grandchild.

Shefali is an associate lawyer in Gowling's Waterloo office. Her practice also focuses mainly on employment law. She works with closely with Neena on AODA issues. She has considerable hands on experience advising employers on a broad of range of workplace matters, from employment contracts, terminations and enforcement of restrictive covenants. She regularly assists her clients with reviewing their workplace policies and procedures. She's qualified to practice law in Ontario and India. She's also known for her pragmatic approach and provides high quality advice to her clients. She's an avid animal lover and loves teaching new tricks to her two adorable fur babies, Chaos and Thor. Before we get started I'd just like to mention that we will have an opportunity to have a question and answer session, so please leave your questions in the question box, and we will try to address your questions before the conclusion of the session. So now I'd like to hand it over to Neena.

Neena: Thank you, Elisa, and welcome everyone. So what I'd like to do is tell you what the agenda is and also tell you a little bit about what we are and are not going. So if we could advance to the agenda slide, please. So I want to essentially do a bit brief overview of the AODA, including making sure you understand what parts of the legislation apply to your business. The AODA actually has some important regulations and the most important for today's day will be the integrated accessibility standard. We will review the obligations under that standard. There is a big emphasis in the AODA on having the right policies and the right training of your employees. So we're going to review your training obligations. Now as Elisa's already alluded to, there's a compliance report coming up so we're going to actually go in some detail about your compliance obligations and how that report works and, briefly, some of the consequences of non-compliance. It's also important to know what this session is not about. It actually will not give you the training that is mandated under the AODA. We do have different seminars with respect to the actual training that's required but today we are trying to really tell business owners, HR professionals, in-house legal counsel about what they need to do for compliance in their entire organization. So it's really more learning about the AODA rather than taking the mandated training under the AODA.

So, why are we doing this now? Well, as you can see on the next slide, we're doing it because the filing deadline is coming up on June 30, 2021. This filing deadline is an extension because it was originally due December 31, 2020. The Ontario Government was actually lobbied to get rid of that filing obligation but felt that that would be inappropriate and gave a 6 month extension, unilaterally, to all businesses with a filing obligation. There's no sense that that's going to be extended again so all of us should be prepared for that June 30, 2021 deadline. By the way, please don't leave it to Wednesday, June 30. Last time there was a filing deadline everybody filed on the last day, December 31, 2017, and the servers crashed and it took us months to figure out whose filing had been accepted and whose had not. So if you can get it done early, you get Brownie points, just like in high school.

What are going to do next? We are going to do a brief overview of the AODA as a structure. So whether your obligation is one employee in Ontario, or thousands of employees in Ontario, you do have obligations under the AODA. This is a philosophical choice that the Government of Ontario has made which is to open up our economy, our businesses, our services, our government itself to employees, customers and citizens with disabilities. The big goal was to make Ontario fully accessible by 2025. That goal was set in 2005 and seemed like such a long time, 20 years. We are fast approaching 2025 and I think, in general, we would agree we've made progress but there is a long way to go. So I'd like to, essentially, turn it over to Shefali who's going to actually handle the next section about the AODA and how you understand your own obligations under that legislation. Shefali?

Shefali: Yup. Thank you, Neena. Hello, everyone. I hope everybody's doing well on this lovely sunny morning. Well at least sunny where I am. So as Neena alluded to I'm going to be spending the next few minutes talking about the basics of AODA, and that is whether your organization is small or large, attracting every potential candidate for employment and customers sustainably to your business and being accessible to potential candidates and employees or customers with disabilities isn't just the right thing to do, it's also the law, and that law is the AODA. That is the topic of our discussion for today's seminar. As Neena said, this law has been passed in 2005. So it's not new anymore. It's been there for over 16 years and unfortunately there is still businesses who are trying to get their feet under and trying to figure out their obligations under this wonderful legislation, which seeks to remove barriers and develops and helps put together processes for developing, implementing and enforcing accessibility standards. So AODA and the accessibility standards help to reduce and remove barriers and make Ontario more inclusive for everyone.

So, let's look at the Ontario Human Rights Code and how that works in conjunction with the AODA. The goal of AODA is not to replace the obligations that service providers and organizations have under the Human Rights Code but what it does is that it walks hand in hand with those obligations from the Human Rights Code. The Human Rights Code focuses on non-discrimination and the fundamental underlying principle is accommodation. Accommodate people to the point of undue hardship, and how AODA beautifully lines up with that foundation is that it helps to reduce and remove barriers by providing a framework for organizations, as to how to put it together in a succinct way so that all parties involved have an understanding of their obligations to make that practice more comfortable for everybody who's involved. So the goal for Ontario Human Rights Code, along with the AODA, is to really maintain the dignity of the persons with disabilities, as well as increase their independence, provide equal opportunity and integration within the society.

Now with that, let's look at who has to comply with AODA. So if your organization, regardless of whether it's public, private or non-profit organization, you have at least 1 employee physically located in Ontario, and you provide goods, services or facilities to the public or to other organizations, then your organization is subject to the AODA. An important aspect is a lot of clients, or a lot of organizations, have this question: how do I count my employees? Who is included when you say employees? First things first, employees outside of Ontario are not counted. You do not count volunteers and you definitely do not count independent contractor. So if you have just independent contractors with your organization in Ontario then the obligations under AODA wouldn't apply. It would start to apply the minute you hire your first employee who's physically located in Ontario. There are different classes to which the AODA applies. It applies to the Government of Ontario and the Legislative Assembly. It applies to large designated public sector organizations with 50 plus employees as well as small designated public sector organizations with under 49 employees, and most importantly, it applies large and small private organizations with 1 to 49 and 50 plus employees. The reason why we specifically spell out the number is because the requirements for compliance under AODA depend on the class and the number of employees that an organization has. Particularly for this seminar, we are focusing on the obligations of private organizations only, so you will hear from both Neena and myself about the different obligations that private organizations, small and large, have under AODA.

The AODA is the Act and it has regulations which basically are the integrated accessibility standards. This regulation, like I said, sets forth the framework as to what the organizations must comply with to ensure that they are participating in making Ontario fully accessible by 2025. I'm going to turn it over to Neena now who will spend some time talking about the different integrated accessibility standards that are formulated under the AODA. Neena, over to you.

Neena: Thanks, Shefali. If you could just advance to the next slide and we are ready to go. In this lovely slide you see kind of how the AODA works. So in the center you have the framework legislation, which is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and then you have a number of regulations that provide you details. The integrated accessibility standard actually covers five areas which, if you do it from clockwise, the built environment, the design of public spaces which could be parking lots, picnic areas, trailways, sidewalks. So it's the physical environment outside, if you will, that is accessible to the public. You have the employment standard and we're going to actually put a lot of time on the employment standard because there are a lot of significant requirements and they apply to every employer in different ways. We have the customer service standard and we'll spend some time on that because that applies to every employer. There's a transportation standard, which is public transportation, we're just going to mention it but we're not going to deal with it because that deals with very specific employers and corporations. Finally the information and communications standard which applies, to differing degrees, to the various classes that Shefali mentioned earlier. One way of looking at it is the Human Rights Code, which I think most of us are familiar with, provides a complaints based mechanism for dealing with human rights issues. The AODA is trying to get away from the complaints based system to a more proactive standard setting that you remove barriers universally. So people don't necessarily have to ask for accommodation because it is already there. The analogy I like to give people is that we take it for granted that there are curb cuts that allow wheelchairs to cross roads. Well that was a design feature, so instead of somebody in a wheelchair or scooter having to ask the Municipality to put in curb cuts, we just proactively design the sidewalks in that manner. That was not always so.

So the first standard, as I alluded to, was the customer service standard. Now, I actually don't like the name of the standard because customer service standard makes it sound like it's a standard that's applicable only to people who have external customers. That was the case when the standard was first introduced over a decade ago. But subsequently the standard was modified so that it actually applied to everyone. So anybody has to take the customer service standard training. Everyone has to have a customer service policy and what people often forget is, if you think about the customer service standard as essentially how to treat people with disabilities standard, it should really be all of us should be trained and even though it says customer service standard, remember everybody deals with the external world. As lawyers we deal with clients, as clients you deal with us as lawyers, so that is an example of an interaction. If I had a disability that needed accommodation you would have a policy and I would know how to ask for that accommodation. Next slide, please.

What does it mean? For some reason I've lost my share screen. If I could get the next slide, I don't know if I'm having a problem on my side, or somebody else's side. Alright. So I think we're having technical difficulties but Shannon is jumping in. What does the customer service standard, however badly named, entail? It requires you to have policies, practices and procedures with some of the obvious things that we associate with disabilities, including the right of individuals to use assisted devices like canes, wheelchairs, tablets, text to voice/voice to text mechanisms. It allows people to bring in registered service animals into all places, except for very few areas, and these are areas where animals are excluded due to health and safety requirements. It requires you to have policies with respect to support personnel into your business and this particularly applies to the restaurant industry, the entertainment industry and transportation where a support person might be needed to bring people in or accompany people while they are availing themselves of your services. It imposes obligations with respect to communication, feedback by customers with disabilities and responding to that feedback and providing information in an accessible format on request. Now one thing that people often forget is the obligation to provide, if there's a temporary disruption to service, to advise people of that. What does that mean? There's a lot of things that able bodied people take for granted, such as elevators, escalators, wheelchair accessible doors, accessible parking. If those things are temporarily disrupted it doesn't make a different to our lives. But imagine if you are using a walker, or in a wheelchair, or you're visually impaired, it may make it impossible for that person to properly access your business, and therefore you have to give notice to people, in a way that's appropriate, about that disruption. That notice could be something that's posted on your door saying, these wheelchair accessible doors are not working. They're being repaired. They'll be back in service in a week but there's another door available 20 yards to the left, or call your cellphone to have assistance, or if you know about a problem you can even say, we can meet at your place. Now a lot of this is really written for the pre-pandemic and the post-pandemic world but, nonetheless, it's an obligation that's often forgotten. As I alluded to earlier you need to have a feedback process so people with disabilities can reach you. With the advent of email, text, chat, phone, mail, many of us already have all of those accessible feedback processes as part of our normal processes. Most importantly there's an obligation to provide training to all your employees and that's extremely important. The good thing about this training is that there's actually free training, and we'll give you those resources at the end of our presentation, that you could adapt and use without cost so that you can provide this training. Finally, you have an obligation to notify your public of your policies. If you have an internet site you can use that or many people just post their policy right in their reception areas. Of course, that too is for the pre and post-pandemic world. Next slide.

I talked about the customer service standard but the next standard that I think people on this call should really get some familiarity with is the employment standard. Employees are impacted, or employers are impacted, by a number of pieces of legislation, many of which do have an equality and inclusion focus. So here you can look at the Employment Standards Act, privacy legislation and the common law of wrongful dismissal and employment law. What we're talking about today, right at 12 o'clock, the AODA. Of course the Ontario Human Rights Code. Workers' Compensation or WSIB in Ontario, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act. So all of these pieces of legislation have been created to essentially protect employees. I will tell you that they don't always fit together in a perfect jigsaw puzzle because they were enacted at different times, by different regimes, and so while they are consistent in their philosophy, sometimes in a logistical way they don't always work the best together but we do the best we can. So if we could go to the next slide, please.

Looking at the employment standard, I'm going to turn it over to Shefali. She's back online, it's great, to talk about how the employment standard really works and to whom it works and how it really governs the life cycle of employees with your organization.

Shefali: Thank you, Neena. Okay. Employment standard. It's probably the most important standard for all employers in Ontario because it sets out different sets of obligations that employers are required to comply with including written obligations, ongoing obligations with respect to a potential candidate that you're looking to hire, all the way until the end of the cycle and that person is no longer an employee. So who does the employment standard apply to? It applies to all prospective hires and employees of their organization. It does not apply to volunteers or other non-paid individuals. Like I said, it applies to different aspects and facets of employment. It starts right at the beginning when you are looking to hire the prospect of candidates. When you're trying to have your job postings up. When you're preparing job offers that you will offer to prospective hires. It also applies to situations where you have employees who've gone off on some sort of illness leave or a disability leave and also employees who are returning back to the office, back to the workforce, from that disability or an illness leave. As well, it applies to all aspects of employment including disciplining employees, whether there are promotions, if there are internal transfers within the organization and, last but not least, the reduction in force.

So how does this standard apply and what are the obligations that are applicable to the employees? Going to my notes here. Okay. So the different obligations. Employers are required to provide accessible processes for recruitment, assessment and selection. What that means is that, for example in your recruitment, on your job postings you need to ensure that it is noted that accommodation is available on request. Further, you need to notify during an interview process, that there is accommodation that is required for assessment to testing, if requested. The employer must also engage the applicant to discuss and find the desired accommodation for the illness or disability. On hire you, as an employer, must ensure that new employees are made aware of certain policies, AODA related policies, during onboarding including the ability to create accommodation plans. This is important because what AODA is trying to set, it's trying to set an expectation between the employer and the employee, that the employers will work in tandem with any requirements of the employee may have, whether now or later in the future, and the employees are encouraged to come forward with those requirements that they have with themselves and make it known to the employer so that they can help them cross that barrier easily. Then there's an obligation about providing emergency response information as well. This information must again be provided right at the front. When you're hiring employees you need to ask if there is any requirement to provide any emergency forms. If there are employees who come forward and share with you that they need a certain type of assistance in case of an emergency, then as an employer, you are required to put together an individual emergency response form, and keep it on file for that employee. Again, when you're trying to create these individual response or individual accommodation plans, keep in mind that it has to be an individual approach. It can be a template that is being used for employees on a back to back basis. One employee's needs will be completely different from another employee's so you have to always start right at the beginning and ask all the right questions and all the questions that are required for an employer to understand what steps it needs to take to ensure that the employee's requests are being met.

Next, of course, the employers are also required to provide accessible formats and communication supports for employees. What that means is basically providing, and we'll talk about it later in the next slide, but it's basically providing documentation maybe in a large font, if an employee requires that I need something printed out in a large form, or something printed out in a colour format. So those are like the most basic and simple examples of accessible formats and communication supports. I spoke briefly about documented individual accommodation plans. We'll get deeper into it later on in the presentation but that's one of the obligations that I wanted to highlight, and of course, we will also talk about the return to work process.

Let's look a little bit more closely at what the recruitment, assessment and selection obligations are. Like I said, we as an employer, need to make sure that you're letting all prospective candidates know of the availability of accommodation for all applicants. Selected job applicants must be notified that accommodation is available in relation to materials or processes followed. This is basically letting them know that you have policies in place which you will share with them once you're selected. Successful applicants, at the time of hiring, must be notified at this time of the policies relating to accommodation. Examples of recruitment would be on job postings. You need to make sure that it's noted that accommodation is available. So let's look at the example of a job posting. Here's an example and, of course, this is a very generic written language. You can of course adapt it based on the style of the organization. As long as you're able to portray that there's some form of accommodation that will be made available to employees. That is the goal. So let's read what the job posting looks like. We are committed to integration and equal opportunity. Accommodation is available to all participants upon request throughout our recruitment process. Please contact Brad Pitt at 1-800 number or email at bradpitt@hollywood.com, if you require accommodation. We will work with all applicants to accommodate their accessibility needs. So it's a simple as this. It could be right at the bottom of your job posting, or right at the top depending on how you want to portray it, but this is something that needs to become part of your job postings going forward, if you have not already done so.

Other obligations include making available supports to be communicated as soon as practical after an employee starts work. What this basically means is that, suppose that individuals with disabilities may need to access information. Like I said, this could be plain language. It could be sign language interpreter. Reading the information out loud to a person who has vision loss. Adding captioning to videos. Using written notes to communicate with someone who is hard of hearing. One thing very important to note is employer's must always consult with people, or employees, to provide a range for provision of accessible formats and communication supports for information that is particularly needed in order to perform the employee's job, and for information that is generally available to employees in the workplace. Remember, like I said, it's not one size fits all kind of a solution so we really need to get into the woods and we need to understand, after talking and after discussing with the prospect of hire of the employee, as to what is it that they really need for the employer to provide that accommodation.

That brings us to the next topic which is the individual accommodation plans. I'm going to turn it back to Neena now who will spend some time talking about the individual accommodation plans that will be required for the employees. Over to you, Neena.

Neena: Thanks, Shefali. So, what is an individual accommodation plan? An individual accommodation plan is essentially a written record of how you are going to accommodate an employee who has a disability. Now this obligation, it's very important, really dovetails with your obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code, and also under the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, to accommodate employees with disabilities or illnesses. But the AODA standard only applies if you have 20 or more employees in Ontario. Essentially you need to have a policy, if you have 20 or more employees, about how people who ask for accommodation how that request will be processed and considered. Once you have essentially come upon a solution you will write up the solution. You will actually sign it and provide it to the employee who will sign it. Most importantly you should review it periodically. This obligation sounds very complicated but in fact it just codifies our obligations as employers under the Ontario Human Rights Code. I actually find that the obligation to put things in writing, record it in writing, and review it periodically, not less than a year, actually prevents human rights problems from occurring. There's a famous case in which an employer was slapped with an award, almost a million dollars, more than a million dollars after everything was added up, because there was a dispute in the evidence as to a particular conversation. That is not going to happen if you write it in writing and get it signed and periodically review and update it. So I actually encourage all employers, small and large, to really consider having robust policies with respect to how accommodation is dealt with and ensure, of course, that the employees know about it. There's a note at the bottom of this slide about how this applies to return to work scenario. If you read the regulation it almost sounds like you need to have two separate policies. One with respect to individual accommodation plans and one with respect to the return to work policy. In my view, the return to work is a subset of all accommodation plans and so I would say that you may wish to really consider integrating your obligation to have a return to work policy with your general policy of IAP. It's just what your preference is. Next slide, please.

As I've indicated before, it's the discipline of writing things down in writing. Now one thing that is really not an AODA concept, but it is a human rights concept and it lives in the AODA as well, is accommodation is to the point of undue hardship. You're not required to provide the employee his or her preferred accommodation or the optimal accommodation. It has to be reasonable accommodation. Once the employee is put on an individual accommodation plan you are entitled to have reasonable expectations of performance. But here's something I'll warn you about, is that accommodation is a bit of a trial and error process, and there is a requirement if you first don't succeed to try again. I've seen too many employers in my career say, we tried that and it didn't work so obviously we can't accommodate. Increasingly, both under the Human Rights Code and the AODA, employers are expected to really make a good faith effort to try to make it work and use the accommodation process as a way of truly integrating a person with a disability into the workplace, as opposed to shrugging your shoulder and saying, that didn't work so we're not going to try anymore.

There are some detailed expectations under the AODA that we should look at which is we have to integrate two things that Shefali mentioned before. One is the individual emergency response plan. So think about an employee, perhaps who is not able to navigate stairs, in order to exit your building in case of an emergency. What is the plan if there is a fire or other evacuation? What are you going to do? Typically, what fire marshals will tell you to do is have a staging area, so the first responders know to go there first. It's an easy solution but let's make sure everybody knows about it. The other thing is a accessible communication supports may be required. So, for example, an employee may need a larger screen in order to blow text up, may need some help in text to voice/voice to text, or may need confirmation of things in emails, because they have a cognitive issue, and it's easier for them if instructions are provided in writing so they can review it periodically through the day. Those kinds of supports should be actually cross-referenced in your individual accommodation plan. It doesn't happen too often but it happens enough that you need to remember to do that and, of course, if you have a formal policy it's going to be one of the things that are check listed right away.

So as you proceed to the next slide, you will see the information and communication standards. Now parts of the standard applies to every workplace in Ontario. Essentially what it says is if you get a request to accommodate a customer, or an employee, or a service provider, on request you have to accede to that request for accommodation. I've been doing this work ever since the AODA was enacted and this is not as high or imposing a standard as it looks when you read it in the legislation. Typically, the response is to provide a document in a PDF or Word version so that people can use text to voice. So that's one common request. Occasionally you will have a request for a complicated graph or chart to be explained orally because somebody can't read the chart or read the graph properly. There's some excellent courses available on essentially drafting communications in an inclusive manner so that your document, or your communication, or your website page already has built in a lot of the techniques necessary to include a large portion of the community that has some form of disability or barrier.

If you look to the next slide, the reason I don't think this is a high standard is it's really typically triggered by on request. So even though I talked about techniques to make your communications accessible to a large swath of the community with disabilities, it's actually not its best practices. But it's on request to provide accessible formats and communication supports. You should have modalities to provide feedback for the broad swath of people with disabilities and, as I said earlier in my presentation, many of the multimodal techniques we already use. Text, smartphones, emails, phone, really lend themselves to the current technology. One thing people forget is emergency procedures plans and public safety. If you provide public safety information, for example evacuation information, emergency contact numbers on request, that information has to be provided in an accessible format. What's accessible? That's a conversation with the person making a request. As I've said earlier, the two most common is some kind of Word or PDF format so they can use their existing technology, or alternatively, a verbal explanation of information that is on a printed page.

If you go finally to the next slide, we have the information and communication standard, the one that's a little bit more complex. This is your websites. This obligation really is applicable if you have 50 or more employees in Ontario and you directly, your organization, directly or indirectly, controls the website. We've had a number of questions, quite frankly, about subsidiary of foreign multi-nationals who may have a Canada webpage but they actually don't control the website. They're a service provider or distribution entity but they don't have much say on the website. That's a factual issue. If in fact you can say, put this on the Canada page, then you at least should make an effort to make the Canadian pages comply with this standard. What is the standard? It's the standard established by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is a non-governmental, voluntary organization that creates standards for web content accessibility. They're often called WCAG, just because it's a bit of a mouthful that WCAG, and the standard to which you're held in the legislation is 2.0 Level AA and there's some exceptions for live captioning and audio descriptions of photographs and stills. Now, just so you know, the actual WCAG organization is working on 3.1 standard. So businesses should actually try to implement these best practices in a matter of course but there is a legislative obligation in Ontario to meet the 2.0 Level AA standard. There are some defenses including where it's not practicable, but as many people will tell you, there is no case law which will tell us what is or is not considered to be practicable. Since January 1, 2021, all websites that are caught by this standard must comply with that Level AA standard with the two exceptions, regarding live captioning and audio descriptions. If we could go to the next slide, please, Shannon.

We're going to go into policies and training. I don't want to make this an infomercial. There's lots of great policies and training out there and, of course you have to pick what's right, but if you're struggling to find something, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We will find you either a good public resource or referral or develop something customized for you, if that's what you want. Shefali delivers a lot of that training so I'm going to dump this all on you, Shefali.

Shefali: Sure. Let's get into it. So let's talk about the policies and training. This is the written obligation for employers and this is probably the way employers are able to show, in case of an audit, that they are compliant with AODA and their obligations under AODA. Now let's talk a little bit about what these written policies are and then we'll get into the training obligations. First and foremost, AODA requires the integrated accessibility standards acquire that all organizations, to which AODA applies, have an accessibility policy. Now what is this policy? It's really a roadmap that provides brief information about what are the different steps, or different policies, that the employer organization, or the organization has taken or put in place to meet with these obligations under the AODA. For example, let's take the example of a large organization, which is defined to be an organization which has 50 or more employees in Ontario. Those organizations are required to comply with the full extent of the written obligations of the AODA. Which means all policies must be put in place, implemented, established and put in place in writing. So you're accessibility policy will actually have a common statement of commitment and then it will have simple paragraphs about each of the policies that you have put in place that specifically deal with the different aspects of the integrated accessibility standards. For example, let's say we have put in place a customer service policy. Please refer to our customer service policy for more information about how we deal with customers. Then it will talk about we've also implemented a multi accessibility plan, which talks about all the different steps that we've taken so far, and what we will continue to take in the future to ensure that we meet with our obligations. Then it will also talk about, if you've implemented a feedback policy, if you've implemented an accommodation and a return to work policy. So that's what your accessibility policy. It's a very simple document. Again, there is no specific template that's been provided, as long as you hit all the basic, or the foundational, aspects that are required under the integrated accessibility standards. It can be drafted in a way that works best for the organization. Now, the requirement to have a written accessibility policy, interestingly only applies to large organizations which is organizations which have 50 or more employees. But the problem that we always have with that requirement is that if you do not have a written policy, you still need to establish a policy. So when you have an audit, and you have an auditor or an inspector asking you, have you complied? Have you established a policy? You say, yes, but then you have to show compliance, it's really hard because you have no written document to actually show that you've put in place all of these policies. So our recommendation is regardless of whether you're a large or a small employer, the minute you have obligations under AODA applicable to you, as a best practice it's better to just go ahead and put in place, at least the basic policies, which is accessibility policy is a basic policy, just to show that you are doing your bit to be compliant with AODA.

Now next is the multi-year accessibility plan. This one specifically only applies to large organizations, and this must be in writing, and the requirement is that it must be updated on a 5 year basis. Again, multi-year accessibility plan is something that tells an inspector, or an organization who is auditing you, that is the accessibility directorate to tell them what are all the steps that you've taken in the past to ensure that you're meeting with your obligations. It also talks about the steps that you will take in the future to continue to meet those obligations. So it should, ideally, address every single aspect in the integrated accessibility standards and it should speak about the steps of the organization has taken, will continue to take. That includes implementing policies, providing training, how are you dealing with your obligations under the Employment Standards Act with respect to hiring employees? How do you deal with the obligations when you're transferring employees or where there's a reduction in force and your feedback policy, etcetera? Now the important thing with the multi-year plan is it is a public document, which means that it is public facing and you have to keep a copy of it available to public. If you have a website that you own and control, you are required to post this policy on your website. If you don't have a website, or you don't own or control it here in Canada, even then you're required to keep it at a reception area or a desk area if an employee, or if service providers, or public walk in and ask to see a copy of it, you must provide it to them. Same with the accessibility policy. The legislation doesn't specifically spell out that it must be posted on your website but it's go hand and hand. It's always good to put it up on the website if you have one or, in any event, you should make it available at the reception are and provide it to public on request.

Next up is the customer service policy. Now, this a requirement that is coming out of the customer service standard which says that all organizations, to which the standard applies, must establish and put in place a customer service policy. Similar to the accessibility policy, the obligation to implement a written policy only applies if you are a large organization, but the same advice applies with respect to best practice. So it's very difficult to show compliance if you don't have a written policy so you might as well just put in place a policy for customer service. The aspects of a typical customer policy are how do you deal with individuals who need assisted devices? How do you deal with individuals who walk in to your establishment with a service animal? How do you deal with people when they walk in with a support person? So those are some of the examples of the different aspects that your customer service policy must address. Another important aspect, which Neena mentioned early on, with respect to temporary disruption. So what it does is that the customer policy must specifically address, or talk about what steps will your organization take in case there is a temporary disruption, and speak to the protocol as to what you will put in place in case of such temporary disruption. That is another mandatory policy that you need to have if the AODA applies to you.

Next up is the feedback policy. The feedback policy comes under two separate head. One, there's an obligation under the customer service standard itself, to have a feedback policy in place. That will basically tell public, or employees, or anyone who's reaching out to the obligation to provide feedback. To reach out to them and let them know that you will come back to them within a certain reasonable amount of timeframe and give them phone numbers, email addresses, or physical address where they can come and actually provide that feedback. So that's one obligation that's coming out of the customer service policy so that could actually be addressed as part of a customer service policy. Then there's a separate aspect that falls part of the information and communication standards. Now that obligation really only applies to you if you, as an organization, have put in place a feedback process. Like in the sense you are allowing customers of public to provide feedback to you, then it says that your feedback policy must also address what steps you will take if these customers of public, who are coming to provide feedback, request that they need to provide feedback in a more accessible format. So that is what your feedback policy will address. And, again, feedback policy, customer service policy, multi-year plan accessibility policy, all of these policies are public facing. Meaning this must be made available to public if they request.

Now coming to the next one, which is the accommodation and return to work policy, this is really an internal policy. The requirement to implement a written accommodation and return to work policy, again, falls strictly on large employers but we recommend that this is a basic policy that is required when you need to implement individual accommodation plans, which is very important from human rights as well as the AODA perspective, and it really provides you with the opportunity to lay down the steps and lay down the responsibilities vis a vis employees and employers to say, what do you need to do? If you need to ask for accommodation, what are the steps that the employer will take when you ask for accommodation? So that makes it clear and it's really good to have. It doesn't need to be made available to public. Of course if auditors or the accessibility directorate ask for it, then you have an obligation to provide a copy to them, but otherwise it's more really an internal document to the company which the HR relies on to follow the accommodation process. That's with respect to the policy aspect and these are the basic policies that you need to have to ensure that you're complying with your obligations under the AODA and the integrated accessibility standards.

Next, moving onto the training obligation. This is an interesting one because training, currently as it stands, must be provided to all employees of the organization and volunteers. Originally when the training obligation was introduced, it was only with respect to training employees or volunteers who were customer facing, or public facing. But I think later on, I can't remember if it was 2015 or 2016, this obligation was expanded and it was applicable to all employees, and really, I think that falls back on the foundation of AODA, which is basically to provide access to everybody and not just to people who are seeking customer service. So anyone who is working for an organization needs to understand some basic things about how do you deal with individuals who need some special care, or individuals who require a different touch, when you are providing services or when you're hiring. So training must be provided to all employees and volunteers including persons who participate in developing your policies. Now, I wanted to touch a little bit upon the aspect of persons who participate in developing your policies. Oftentimes we have questions that come up and say, I have a unit who is sitting in Alabama who's working on these documents for us, does it mean that they need to provide some sort of a training to that person who's helping us create those policies? Well simple answer to that is, yes. The training really is not a lot, and like you'll see in the next slide, there are free resources that are provided. It's really important for people who are participating in creating training materials to understand what AODA is trying to achieve. Without that understanding it really doesn't help that the training is being provided with someone who doesn't understand the foundations of AODA. So, yes, the training must be provided to all individuals who are participating in developing your policies. Lastly, all persons who provide goods and services on behalf of the company must also be trained.

So what does the training entail? So there are two heads of training under the AODA. One is the basic training itself which is the training on the different integrated accessibility standards. Meaning the different standards about the employment, employment standard, customer service standard, information and communication standard, transportation and purpose sign and also the fundamentals of Ontario Human Rights Code. Like we discussed earlier on in this presentation, AODA works in conjunction with the Human Rights Code and implements the foundations and the concepts that are enshrined in the Human Rights Code. So it's really important for all individuals to understand what those basic fundamentals are with respect to what constitutes a disability. What is the concept of accommodation because accommodation is up to point of undue hardship. So basics of human rights. So that is one part of the training, and that's the general training that must be provided to all employees and volunteers and persons who participate in developing your policies, and persons who provide goods, services on behalf of the company. Then there's a second set of training which is an obligation that really comes out of the customer service standard. Now again, customer service standard training, like Neena mentioned, it's a badly named legislation. It says customer service standard but the training really must be provided to all employees, regardless of whether or not your providing service to customers, and this is really the basics of how do you interact with people who walk in with a service animal? Basics like don't pet the animal. The animal is not there for recreational purposes. It's actually doing a job. How do you interact with people who have vision impairment? How do you interact with people who come in with support persons. That's the kind of training that customer service focuses on and that is the type of training that must be provided to all employees. So that, in a nutshell, are the obligations for training for all organizations. Now, with respect to training, there is also an obligation to maintain records of those trainings. Strictly speaking, maintaining records is not applicable to small organizations, but again, same recommendation applies. If you don't maintain the records of the training it's going to be very difficult for you to show that you actually did complete the training for all the employees. So that is with respect to training.

Moving on. So on this slide you'll see some of the free materials that Ontario Human Rights Code provides, with respect to the human rights aspect of the training. This is really at the basic, and as long as your organization is able to utilize this training and provide it to all your employees, you're at least meeting with the aspect of the general training requirements. Again, it meets with all the basic requirements under the AODA, but of course, if you have a specific flavour or if you want to customize it more depending on how you want to provide the training to your employees, you can definitely go ahead and modify that training. But for the purposes of meeting your minimum obligations so that you're able to check that off on your compliance reports saying, yes, they've completed their training, this is an excellent resource. On the next slide you'll see another option for free training. AccessForward. This is a little bit more detailed than the Ontario Human Rights Code training and is a really good resource. It has been prepared by the Government of Ontario to help companies ensure that they're meeting with their training obligations. So AccessForward actually has both forms of training. It has the customer service training as well as the general training under AODA, which is with respect to the basics of AODA and the integrated accessibility standards, as well as the Human Rights Code. So these are two free resources that are available to everybody and they can be leveraged to ensure that you're meeting with your training obligations under AODA. That brings us now next to our hot topic as to why we're having this seminar today. That is the compliance report and over to you, Neena.

Neena: Yes. There's an exam on or before June 30 and we're all swapping for the exam. Can I just mention on the training, you will have seen the AccessForward materials. They actually have techniques where you can embed their units into your own learning and development programs. They've essentially given a licence to anyone to use their materials provided that there is an acknowledgement. So excellent resources, even though it does not do the customer service training, that basic training that was required since a decade ago, it really gives you great start on all of the other training obligations. So I'm a real fan of that site. So going into the compliance report. If we could go to the next slide, please. Who has to comply? We got this question in the Q&A and I didn't answer it because it's companies with 20 or more employees in Ontario. So if you have 20 or more employees in Ontario, and that does count part-time employees, so you will have to file a compliance report. Now the compliance report that you file, when you are 20 to 49 employees, is a different one than if you have 50 or more employees in Ontario. The purpose is really to ensure that you have met your accessibility requirements under the AODA. Typically, the timing was every 3 years. I mentioned earlier that the last filing deadline was December 31, 2017, when the government's servers crashed. It should have been December 31, 2020 and extended to June 30, 2021, largely because of the pandemic. What we don't know is whether or not the next filing deadline will be December 31, 2023 or June 30, 2024. We'll see. We still live in a pandemic world and a lot of things are uncertain.

So if we go onto the next slide you'll see some of the information that we need to have in order to compile your report. There will be questions about your compliance with the customer service standard, if you are between 20 and 49 employees in Ontario. However, if you're a large organization in Ontario, 50 plus, you will have questions regarding all of the integrated accessibility standards. We won't have time to go through the entire questionnaire but I'm actually going to try to queue up and steal the screen from Shannon and queue up my screen so you can see a little bit of what it looks like. To complete the report, if you could go to the next slide, all filers, so 20 plus, will require some basic information. You will need the full legal name of your entity. You will need the business number. That's the Revenue Canada number that's given to you. You will need to provide the total number of employees that are in Ontario. You have to provide a name and contact information of the certifier and that person is going to be the person who says, I'm confident this report is accurate and complete. It's often a senior HR operational person. It does not have to be the CEO. You can file for up to 20 organizations. So if you're a large organization that has lots of related employers, or companies, if they're the same size, so 20 to 49 or 50 plus, you can actually file for up to 20 organizations at one. So essentially you just keeping adding their business number and legal name and you keep doing it at the same time. So that's something that not a lot of listeners will have to do but it can be a helpful thing to know. I'm going to try and see if I can share my screen. If, Shannon, you could stop sharing your screen for one second, that would be great. We'll try again.

So hopefully what you see, and somebody shout out if you don't see it, is a document that says 'AODA Accessibility Report'. Because the large employer has no obligations I'm actually going to take you through that one. It's not easy to do online because they don't let you see the questions unless you file. So actually we pretended to file for Gowling in order to get all the questions and replicated the exam, if you will. Now this form starts with B because form A is really inputting the name of your company, the business number and who certifies. Alright? So this is the stuff that I haven't gone through. Essentially you can see how the questions look. It starts with, does your organization have written accessibility policies and a statement of commitment? It should be yes. I'm hoping that all these questions you'll be able to answer, yes, and if you can't,

Shefali: Neena?

Neena: Yeah?

Shefali: Sorry to interject. We can't see your screen. We're only seeing a screensaver.

Neena: Oh dear. That's very sad. Okay. Let me try one more time and if this doesn't work I'll just stop doing this. Yes, I am on the screensaver. Bad girl. Okay, let's try this. Did that work any better?

Shefali: It does, yes.

Neena: It does. Okay, good. Alright. Thank you very much, Shefali. So, you'll see that we started at B because we assume that you put in who you are and who's certifying your business number and we're going to start your accessibility requirements. You'll see you start with, do you have a written accessibility policies and a statement of commitment? Say, yes. If you don't, make sure you are yes by the time that you actually get to it. If you are struggling with it reach out to us and we can actually help you or we can refer you to resources. Then it says, have you done your multi-year accessibility plan? You heard Shefali talking all about that. Remember, this is a large employer one. You won't be asked these questions if you are 20 to 49. Do you provide training on the AODA integrated accessibility standards regulation and the Human Rights Code? Right? Are you generally compliant? Are you complying with the customer service standard? Then it goes to information and communication and it goes to emergency procedures. I'm not going to go through all the questions. It's very boring to do that. Are you generally compliant with the information and communication standard? It has some very detailed questions about your employment practices. You can see that here. We're going to send you this so don't worry about trying to scribble everything. We're sending you a number of very helpful tools to help you get compliant. Now, some people have said, what do I do if it doesn't apply? The one that often doesn't apply to people is design of public spaces. The question is, since your organization submitted it's most recent accessibility compliance report, has your organization constructed new or redeveloped existing exterior paths of travel? So sidewalks and paths that it intends to maintain. So if you're a tenant, like we are, and it's really the landlord that does all of that it actually is the landlord's filing that will cover it. Not yours. You will be responsible for the portion that you've leased, in terms of its accessibility but not the exterior paths of travel. When you click no, on that survey if that's what the right answer is, those questions disappear. So 13(a) would disappear. Right? Similarly you'll be asked questions about public use eating areas. I can tell you that our own office in Waterloo, they put in a whole bunch of picnic tables and stuff, pre-pandemic I might add, and of course that would be the landlord's report. Not our report. So once we press no 14(a) disappears. And so on and so forth. Play spaces, same thing. Accessible off-street parking, same thing. You will see that those are ones that probably your landlord has to fulfill. If you're a landlord, real estate developer, you will have to deal with and grapple with your obligations under the design of public spaces standards.

Somebody asked a question about, what's our accessibility standard if we lease space? The biggest one in this area is your service counter. Your reception desk. If you have updated your reception desk, which we did about 3 years ago, we actually have to make sure that we have an accessible reception area that has some requirements in terms of making sure that we have room for wheelchairs, scooters and walkers, but also that we have a lowered service counter and you see this quite often at banks, so that a person using a scooter or a wheelchair can make eye to eye contact with the receptionist. So that would be one that many office or tenant people will have to grapple with. One thing I note is that if you're ever using an interior designer or an architect, they often just automatically comply with the AODA requirements, as a best practice. Then you'll see the questions on waiting areas, which I've anticipated, and then you get generic-ish questions. So that really is your exam, for large ones. For a small company you will get a very small questionnaire that really deals with your customer service standards. We will send you the exam questions and we will clearly identify which exam questions, as I call it, apply to the small organization, which is 20 to 49 and which applies to 50 plus, and if you are that 1 to 19 category so you're a smaller entity in Ontario, then you don't have to file but as Shefali has indicated, there's some best practices that we would encourage you to consider.

I'm going to assume that most of you are compliant but there are some consequences for non-compliance and I would invite Shefali to essentially take us through the next slides which deal with some of the fines that are available under the AODA legislation.

Shefali: Thank you, Neena. Issues with non-compliance. So far we are of the view that the government is going to use a nurturing approach to ensuring compliance with the AODA. While AODA has some harsh maximum penalties, the integrated accessibility standards actually softens the blow with substantially lower monetary penalties before the maximum penalties can incur. As you can see on the screen here, the maximum daily penalty of $100,000.00 for incorporation and $50,000.00 for individual or unincorporated organizations comes out of the Act itself, but under the regulations, the accessibility directorate has gone ahead and explained as to what are the different categories and what are the different types of contraventions that would occur based on which the fines would be categorized. So the contravention, the penalties and fines will really depend on the severity and the history of the contravention. The directorate will determine the severity of the contravention by ranking the contravention as minor, moderate or major. So as you can see, there are different buckets. For minor it's $2,000.00. For moderate contraventions it's $1,000.00 and for minor it's $500.00. Quickly catching up on what constitutes minor, moderate and major, where there's been no more than one previous contravention within a period of two current reporting cycles. That's a minor contravention. Moderate, where there have been two to five previous contraventions that's moderate and major would be six or more. Based on our experience, we've seen that accessibility directors are really looking at fining where there's been a total failure of compliance where a company has had over 50 employees for the last 10 or 15 years and they have failed to comply with basic obligations under AODA. Of course, decisions will be made on a case by case basis, and the next part of the issue with non-compliance is the reputational damage. Neena? Sending it over to you for reputational damage.

Neena: Just as we were preparing these slides, Shefali, I saw this article about a woman who has spina bifida and uses your forearm crutches to get around. She was prevented from using a washroom that is downstairs because the server thought it was too dangerous for her to go down. If she had been properly trained under the AODA she would have known that the appropriate thing is, can I be of assistance? Or, if you're not comfortable with the stairs, we've made arrangements with the business next door that has a level access to washrooms. But not preventing somebody. Incidentally, I had a friend who was in a very similar situation, you would be amazed how well she did with crutches. So this reputational damage is horrible. It's a small restaurant in Toronto and it's really on the front page of the Toronto Star for being bad to people with disabilities. Nobody needs that kind of coverage.

So we have had have tons of questions and we realize that we are short of time but I did want to take a few questions, and Elisa, I think in the interest of time what I'm going to do, if you want to go to the question slide, is I'm just going to read some of the questions, and, yes I should do some tips. Please, please. No last minutes. Please. Because of that reach out if you need help and we're going to send you some great tools so you can do some self-assessments and really identify where you may have some concerns. So I know we have a few minutes to deal with questions and I think we've actually dealt with a whole bunch of them. But I'm going to just go through some of them.

There's a couple of questions with respect to mental illness and whether that constitutes a disability. We are in mental health week and, in fact, mental health is absolutely recognized as a disability, cognitive disabilities. It could be acquired brain injury. It could be depression but all of those are recognized as disabilities. So that's a common question. We have an excellent question about service animals. If you don't have customers, you should absolutely still allow service animals for employees so that should be part of our your policy. Elisa, are there any other questions that you think that we should address, that I've missed?

Shefali: I've seen a couple on the training policies. I wanted to quickly address that. I think there is a question there about can you club all the policies into one? We would not recommend it, especially if you're a large organization, it's better to keep your policies separate especially with respect to your customer service policy and your multi-year accessibility plan. Also, like I said, not all of the policies are public facing. Your accommodation and return to work policy is an internal policy. So if you club it all together you're going to have to put that on your website as well or make it available. So that's not ideal. It's not ideal to club it all. If you can, please split it up.

Neena: There's a really good question in this new world of the gig economy about what about if we have workers who are working from a placement or a temporary agency? So typically if people are providing goods and services on your behalf, so on your behalf, you have to have them trained. That is a factual analysis. You might want to make a quick call to one of us but definitely the placement agency, or temporary work agency, itself will have obligations to provide training as well. So that's often something that is discussed between you and your staffing agency about what kind of training is appropriate. Remember, a lot of this training can be done online via webinar, so we're not talking about a large ask. I'm just trying to look and I appreciate that we're going to have wrap in a minute, I'm getting the signal. Oh! One good question is website requirements might not apply to websites behind a password or an app. So the legislation does not, first of all, apply to that whole world of apps, arguably. I know that the accessibility directorate was looking at new rules and all of that got put on hold due to the pandemic. The other thing that's very interesting, what the questioner asked is what if it's behind a password. Think about a portal where you have enter your password and then you access information. I'm going to talk about banks. They're Federally regulated so they're actually exempt from the AODA. They have other obligations but not AODA obligations. So the landing page and the password interface itself has to be totally compliant with WCAG 2.0 Level AA, but arguably, everything behind it does not. You may have other obligations which is to provide accessible information on request but you may not have the actual WCAG obligation. Now that is something I've been consulted on by many organizations. I've even approached the accessibility director Their answer is, that's not consistent with the spirit of what we were trying to do. My response is, yes I understand that but look at your own legislation. So currently I think that if it is legitimately behind a password you probably have a defense. Now, again, you have to think about the fact of where the accessibility director is going to go, which is to include some of that, I believe. At least I've been told that. You also have to look at reputational damage. Do you really want to be the company that is on the front page of the Toronto Star for not trying to address accessibility as best possible?

I think we're running out of time so I'm going to leave it there. We realize we had 80 questions. We probably should just do a Q&A on AODA and not present anything. We do hope that we answered some of your questions during our presentation though.

Elisa: Thank you so much, Neena and Shefali. That was an extremely informative session and I hope everyone enjoyed it. As I mentioned, we are presenting a series of six webinars. This was the first in our series. Our next seminar is on mandatory vaccinations, a topic I think that's on the mind of a lot of employers. That will be on May 27. We will be sending out the invitations soon so please keep an eye out for that invitation and we truly hope that you can join us for that session. We hope you have a wonderful day and stay safe.

Shefali: Bye, everyone.