As our tracking of candidate stances on the downtown summer street closures continues, today we look at a highly revealing exchange with council candidate Sonya Elliott.
After emailing the remaining candidates on the ballot to ask if they would commit to removing the barriers that deny residents with disabilities equal access during Open Air, Elliott’s initial response was a brief, two-word reply: “Good question.” When pressed directly with a follow-up asking for her actual answer, she sent a response that exposes a misunderstanding of physical accessibility.
Elliot’s Position: Widening the Barricades for Wheelchairs
“Good morning. If by barriers you are talking about the white barricades that block the streets, I see no problem in having them adjusted so that a wheelchair could easily go around them and yet still block the traffic.”
Key takeaways from her response include:
- A Literal Interpretation of “Barriers”: Elliott assumes that when residents with disabilities talk about “barriers” during Open Air, they are referring exclusively to the physical barricades used to close the roads.
- The Wheelchair Workaround: Her proposed solution to making the four-month event footprint accessible is to simply widen the gap between the road-closure barricades so that a person using a wheelchair can physically bypass them on the street.
The Reality: It is difficult to overstate how concerning this response is. Elliott’s only suggestion for barrier removal is literally to slide a road barricade over a few inches to let a wheelchair squeeze past.
For many people with disabilities, their vehicle is their assistive mobility device.
The barrier of Open Air has absolutely nothing to do with whether a wheelchair can roll around a barricade. The barrier is that the entire street grid is entirely locked down to vehicles. When you ban cars from Dalhousie and its intersecting streets for 16 weeks, you immediately strip away essential curbside parking, accessible drop-off zones, and direct proximity to pharmacies, banks, and businesses.
Telling a person with a severe mobility challenge that they are welcome to roll around a barricade completely ignores the fact that they cannot even get downtown in the first place because their vehicle has been banned from the core. It treats a pedestrian-only zone as a mandatory default, and assumes that people with disabilities are perfectly capable of navigating a sprawling outdoor festival footprint on foot or by wheel—so long as the town leaves a gap in the barriers.
What Do You Think?
Sonia Elliott believes that adjusting the physical road barricades to let a wheelchair pass is a sufficient solution to the Open Air accessibility crisis.
Does this response show a fundamental failure to understand how vehicle-reliant residents navigate our town? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. .
