Disabling disability

Great Expectations and Impaired Mobility in the Neoliberal City

It is a Sunday afternoon of what my memories tell me ought to feel like spring. My muscles twitch in anticipation of cycling amidst budding trees, warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. But those urges are quickly tempered as my mind is still on a frightening news story that I read this morning in yesterday’s Winnipeg Free Press. “Sick of the System” is about the indignant treatment of a man who lives with diabetes, lost a leg to the disease last year, and did not receive his disability top-ups to his social assistance cheque for two months this winter because he needed to prove to the managing office that he was still experiencing disability. His story brings to mind the injustices faced by Brian Sinclair, who died in his wheelchair after waiting 34 hours in a Winnipeg emergency waiting room, and I take a deep breath. 

Mobility is an essential resource and a right that we enact in our daily lives. Rarely do we give much thought to how it might also be a privilege experienced by some people and a burden for others. The question of how individual mobility is stratified in society is about who gets to move through spaces with the greatest ease - and why? More importantly, at the other end of this question is who gets to participate and who becomes marginalized in the process of trying? The answers to this can be found in what our city prioritizes as an ideal citizen and how the city addresses everyone else. As someone who has suffered a spinal cord injury, this is my area of concern.

Increasingly, Winnipeg is becoming a neoliberal city whereby monetization of social goods is a norm and access to mobility is offered to and accessed by people who experience privileges such as being able-bodied, working age, career-oriented, middle-class, and can afford to drive to and fro. This matters because this is who the city considers to be a productive member of society, someone who ought - in theory - to cost the public the least and to contribute to our economy the most. When decisions are made regarding the trajectory of our city, such as budgets and priorities, it is this ideal that is pursued and which seeks to be replicated.

In order to receive the rights and benefits of citizenship, this is the ideal that we need to try to reproduce in our daily lives. With governments focused on job creation and growth, we are required to emulate these neoliberal goals in our personal lives. If we cannot, we must submit to accessing supports and services on the terms of administrative bodies that treat us as members of uniform populations, rather than as individuals with specific needs. 

The problem with this is that few people actually fit this ideal, so we make decisions that favour an elusive end goal rather than consider who is here now, how we need to participate, and if this is something that will work for all of us. According to the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, more than half of all formal complaints filed in 2012 were related to disability discrimination. Winnipeg has an aging population, high levels of poverty and a backlog of infrastructure repairs. In many ways, it is not in our best interest to continue to pursue development at the periphery, to invest in sites where we have to travel further to get anywhere and to have to maintain even more public services. But, it’s what we are doing.

Words matter when they are accepted as policy because they have a great deal of power over the negotiations that we have to make about who we want to be and how we are going to get there. The negative effects of these policies are largely invisible because they are borne by the people who are devalued in the process. That so many people’s lives are becoming circumscribed by marketization of a public good like mobility is not okay.

As part of my master’s thesis research at the University of Manitoba, I have interviewed people who, like myself, have experienced a spinal cord injury. We are all doing our best to make our way through life in a dignified way. Yet, the realities of navigating a city which doesn’t fully value us when our bodies change demonstrates to us their divestment in our social capital as citizens.

Daniel is a participant in my research. He experienced his injury as the result of a biking accident. It has been six years since his injury and he has yet to find paid employment. He wants to remain independent but it’s difficult. “I’ve worked my whole life,” he says. “I put myself through university while working. I only got a student loan one year, and that’s ‘cause I bought a car. So I’ve been self-sufficient … a productive member of society, and that’s the hardest part about my disability. Because now I feel like I’m - what? Now I’m just waiting to die?” 

It is truly terrifying to feel like you do all that you can given the opportunities available and that you can still be excluded so profoundly from obtaining your goals in life. Having worked with seniors, youth, newcomers, and people living in poverty to advocate for our needs it has become clear to me that it’s not just people with differently abled bodies and minds that experience impaired mobility in urban space. This kind of friction occurs for different groups of people who cannot move through space freely as the city would expect from us. We can add to this list parents of young children, people living with acute or chronic illness, and very significantly, groups who experience racism. Our suffering is for the benefit of people and systems more interested in monetary profits than in our embodied well-being.

I want better for all of us. So, I ask you, what direction do we go in? Because we’re all in this together and it’s worth knowing what we want for those times when we can make decisions that shape public policy. I urge you to vote and to ride safely!

Karina Cardona is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg and currently studies at the University of Manitoba.

Part of the series: The Urban Issue 2014

Published in Volume 68, Number 25 of The Uniter (March 27, 2014)

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