[On October 22, 2025, I was invited to participate in a “Story Day” event in Toronto. This is an annual event organized by Erinn Oxford and the team at The Dale. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to participate. This year’s theme was “Accessibility.” Below is the transcript of what I shared.]
Introduction: Hello, my name is Dan and I am a Canadian settler of Dutch, Scottish, and Irish descent. I was born in Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, and Chonnonton territory, in a place now referred to as London, and I continue to reside there with my children.
Tonight, we have gathered to share stories about accessibility. To me, this inevitably raises the question of barriers, things we construct—as organizations, cultures, and nations—that make certain things inaccessible to certain people. Storying accessibility raises the issue of oppression—and how we go about collectively liberating ourselves from it.
However, oppression and its multitudinous barriers are designed to be hard to see if you are a person who benefits from oppression. The more you benefit from oppression, the harder it is for you to see the ways in which others have radically different experiences of the very same people, places, and things as you. Thus, learning to see is essential to learning to be free. The first of the two short stories I will tell provides one example of that kind of learning.
Story #1: I never realized just how atrocious snow removal is in London until I was a single parent with two small children. As a frontline worker, my wages were shit so I couldn’t afford a car—but I did manage to score a great double stroller. Before work, I would take my daughter, Ruby, to daycare, and my son, Charlie, to JK. I would wrap each of them in snowsuits and blankets and head out into the dark. I waded through lakes of slush at intersections, scaled jagged barricades thrown up by the road plows, and wildly flailed across icy patches (“Black ice is like regular ice but a fun surprise,” Charlie said to me as I tried not to die). By the time I arrived at work, I was drenched with sweat. I caught pneumonia but my doctor repeatedly misdiagnosed me. So, I plodded on with my routine. After all, along with my shit wages, I had shit benefits and no support for childcare, so I needed to save my sick days for days when the kids were sick. Feeling like my total collapse was imminent, I eventually went to an after-hours clinic. The doctor listened to my breathing with a grin. “Wow!” he said gleefully. “You have the very worst case of pneumonia I’ve ever heard!” He wanted to hospitalize me but I couldn’t afford that. I got a script for antibiotics and returned to work.
That winter of double-stroller-pneumonia-and-fun-surprises, taught me to see differently. Once we changed the curbs so that people didn’t have to step down into the street and made crossing signals audible, I figured we had this accessible city shit on lock. I was wrong. It turns out that a lot of people who use mobility aids are trapped inside all winter. Not just trapped, but imprisoned by neoliberal municipalities who impose austerity upon those who are deemed insufficient as human capital and who, therefore, are treated as human waste. Death comes by a thousand budget cuts.
So back to my point about learning to see. My kids see the snow in December and say, “Yippee!” My neighbor sees the same snow and says, “I’ll see you in April.” For my friend Jeff, this is old news because he has had to confront these dynamics his whole life. For me, it wasn’t until I was 32 that I learned to see what was right there the whole time.
But learning to see well in one area is no guarantee that one can see well in others. It is critically important that those of us doing this work—those of us who like to think we already see very well, thank you very much—always remain open to being confronted about our blind-spots. Thus, my second story is about one of the most insidious ways I believe oppression operates in services that present themselves as “low-barrier,” “safe,” and “accessible.”
Story #2: In many services that offer walk-in supports, it is standard practice for things like granola bars and juice boxes to be kept at the reception desk. Dehydration, low blood sugar, and exhaustion, all dramatically impact how a person is in the world. Sometimes all that a person needs to return to being the self they love most, is a little something to eat and drink.
One day a man I know walked into a place I know. He had not eaten or slept for days. He was suffering. He asked for a snack and drink from the receptionist. The receptionist had nothing to give him. The man became upset. He was starving, dehydrated, exhausted, and seeking support (where he had been told to go to receive support), but nothing was forthcoming. So, he became angry and he yelled and he swore—and then he was ordered to leave immediately otherwise the police would be called to remove him. The police have never been kind to this man. In fact, he has been physically assaulted by the police on multiple occasions. So now we have a man who is suffering who goes to a designated helping-place for help, who, instead of receiving help is treated as something monstrous to be thrown-away, and who is told that those who have abused him in the past will come and take him if he doesn’t follow orders. So, he becomes outraged. He bangs on the counter top. He yells and swears more. And the police come. He can’t believe that this is what is happening. He’s not doing very well. He’s scared—fight or flight kicking in—he’s tired, he’s hungry, and it’s hard to think. He yells and swears at the police. And the police pile onto him. They throw him on the floor inside the helping-place and they put their knees on his head. And then they drag him away and the helping-place debates how long he should be banned for—thirty days? Sixty days? Forever?
There’s one more part to this story, but before I get there, I want to ask, what the fuck is going on here? Why did this happen and why does this sort of thing happen so often? The answer to these questions is found in understanding another oppressive dynamic that functions to make social services and healthcare institutions inaccessible to many of the people they claim to serve. The dynamic is this: these organizations prioritize the comfort of their staff over the safety of their clients. Our bodies react in similar ways when we are uncomfortable and when we are unsafe, but there is a big difference between the two. While safety pertains to genuine threats to one’s wellbeing, comfort has a lot to do with class and where one is situated within the hierarchies developed by racial capitalism, settler colonialism, ableism, saneism, and so on. It turns out that comfort is inevitably infected with racialized biases, class-based norms, patriarchal privileges, Christian or post-Christian behavioral expectations, and bougie codes related to manners and cleanliness.
What’s especially brutal about this is the way in which classist and racist people disguise their cruelty and cowardice by branding otherwise harmless people as potentially deadly threats to public safety. Consequently, the police are called to engage in violent, and not infrequently lethal, interventions—often under the Orwellian name of a “wellness check.” Calling the cops on someone is the equivalent of saying that “I’m so desperate to be rid of you—because you yelled at me about granola bars—that I’m willing to risk you being killed so I don’t have to interact with you anymore.” Consequently, even though helping-places put up signs declaring “this is a safe space,” the safety of the most oppressed is always the first thing sacrificed when middleclass workers feel discomfort. This privileging of the comfort of paid staff members over the safety of oppressed community members is one of the most ubiquitous and deadly barriers to accessibility present in places that promote themselves as caring.
And what’s the end of the story? Later the same day, the program manager was at the front desk and she became upset and yelled at the receptionist. Afterwards, the manager tried to make a joke of the whole thing. She said she hadn’t had her coffee or lunch yet. She said she was “jonzing for her caffeine fix” and “feeling a little hangry.” Everybody laughed politely. Because that’s how it goes with the shit—it always flows downstream. So, I hope you all have hip-waders and nose-plugs. Because we’re following that flow back to its source. ¡Ya basta! Enough is enough. Thank you very much.