Questions for You to Ask Federal Election Candidates (CRPD)

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)

Will your party commit to delivering on the intent of the CRPD for people with disabilities, particularly women and girls with disabilities and others facing multiple forms of discrimination, by:

• Ratifying the Optional Protocol to the CRPD?
• Designing a strategy for implementation of the CRPD? (CRPD Article 4, 33)
• Naming the Canadian Human Rights Commission to monitor implementation of the CRPD? (CRPD Article 33)
• Restoring the Court Challenges Program, which provided resources to disability associations (and other groups) seeking to establish or to confirm their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as a vehicle for promoting a fuller measure of inclusion and citizenship? (CRPD Article 5, 13)
• Implementing the strictest possible safeguards and restrictions on assisted suicide?  (CRPD Article 4, 10, 19, 25, 26)
• Ensuring effective access to palliative care, including rural communities – to meet unmet needs and support caregivers, and to help ensure assisted suicide is a last resort. (CRPD Article 25)
• Recognizing ASL/LSQ as an official language? (CRPD Article 2, 21)

Inform Candidates about the CRPD

The CRPD is a new international treaty that envisions a world where people with disabilities have full enjoyment of their human rights.  The CRPD is consistent with the guarantees of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canadian human rights laws

The Optional Protocol (OP) is also an international treaty. The OP allows individuals to bring before the CRPD Committee information about violations of their rights and it allows the Committee to undertake investigations of serious violations of the CRPD after all available domestic remedies have been exhausted.