Canadian Association for Community Living forms in 1958
How a Parent Group Changed Canada's Disability Landscape
According to ChatGPT (which is what I use to find dates that are difficult to find elsewhere) on this date in 1958, the Canadian Association for Community Living was founded.
As the ChatGPT website says (and as I’ve seen for myself recently) it’s not always right. But CACL’s founding date has proven incredibly difficult to find, so I’m going to go with this one. It’s an important date!
Image Description: Young man worker with Down syndrome with manager and other collegues working in industrial factory.
The Canadian Association for Community Living was founded as The Canadian Association for Retarded Children, and changed names once more before it became CACL in 1985.
The founders were a parent group in Toronto. They met first in 1948, concerned that support and education for their developmentally disabled children could only be delivered via residential placement in Huronia Regional Centre (then the Ontario Hospital School.) They began their advocacy almost immediately, and by 1953 they’d inspired the formation of so many similar parent groups around the province that they officially formed what is now Community Living Ontario. That same year, they got the Ontario goverment to revise the Education Act to include a regulation that provided $25 of monthly funding per student for parent groups to teach classes of children who’d been declared ineligible for school. This small advocacy victory opened the door to others, and other provinces soon developed their own Community Living organizations to see what they could accomplish.
The national Community Living Organization, as stated earlier, was founded on this date in 1958. It became Inclusion Canada in 2020.
Beliefs and Values
I got my start in disability work through the Community Living movement when I was just a teenager. Inclusion Canada’s vision of “an inclusive Canada in which people with an intellectual disability and their families are valued equally and participate fully in all aspects of society” really speaks to me, as do its beliefs (from the Inclusion website):
The lives of people with an intellectual disability should unfold no differently than those without disabilities; immersed together with their peers without a disability in the same pathways and experience of life common to us all.
All people are entitled to equal access and opportunity. Equality demands protection from all forms of discrimination or harm, and access to the supports necessary to enable equal participation.
In the fundamental value and dignity of all people, and honour and respect diverse identities and experiences. Our humanity and uniqueness cannot be reduced to words, labels, categories, definitions, or genetic patterns.
In speaking up and taking action on our values and beliefs, even when it is difficult.
It’s important to acknowledge this day in Canada’s disability history because CACL and the Community Living moment helped move the country toward deinistutionalization, giving intellectually disabled people opportunities to be a part of communities across the country.
Check out Inclusion Canada’s website to learn more about the great work they’re doing, and check out this essay by Gord Kyle for more information about the history of the Community Living movement in Canada.