CAN-ASC-1.1 Standard on employment: Public Review Draft – Annex B (informative) Lived experience with disability

This Standard is intended to apply to the following contexts for workers with disabilities:

• Scenario 1: A job applicant with a lived experience with a disability comes to work for the organization.
• Scenario 2: A worker acquires a lived experience with a disability while working for the organization. This may occur through accident, illness, or injury unrelated to the workplace, as well as accident, illness, or injury while at work.

These two scenarios are distinct from one another, such that a "one size fits all" work disability management framework would not be successful. This Standard proposes instead a system that is comprised of equal parts, responsiveness to a person-centred identification of accessibility needs and systemic implementation of environmental solutions for accessibility and inclusion in the workplace. Such a system is more likely to be responsive to the individuality of lived experience and work conditions for workers with disabilities.

Conditions leading to disability can occur at any age (birth, childhood, young adulthood, working age) - be progressive, episodic, or situational - and have diverse functional impacts based on severity. Thus, disability doesn’t fit into a neatly framed disabled/non-disabled dichotomy (Lightman, 2009), and accessibility solutions for workers with disabilities may evolve over time and/or apply in some circumstances, but not others.

Disability and accessibility are not static concepts. Their definitions are always evolving. Both terms reflect concepts and lived experiences that are understood and applied in many different ways depending on circumstance and approach. For example, the lived experience of a young adult with a disability transitioning from school to work – potentially through work-integrated learning opportunities – is, at its root, distinct from the lived experience of an older adult who acquires a disability while on the job. This Standard views disability and accessibility through a lens that captures this fluidity.

Because someone may acquire a disability at any time in their life, it is important for this Standard to be inclusive of return-to-work and stay-at-work approaches for workers who acquire a disability while in the workforce, as well as offering accessibility solutions for workers who come to the workplace with a disability.