Thank you for inviting me to speak today. As said, my name is Michelle Hewitt. I live in Kelowna, B.C. I am the chair of Disability Without Poverty, a national charity.
I have had the privilege to fly on a number of occasions. It is always extremely stressful and usually results in some damage somewhere to my wheelchair. I could give you a laundry list of things that have happened, but I'll concentrate on one major event.
In October 2013, I was flying with my daughter—she's here with me today as my assistant—and our family to meet up in Florida with my parents flying in from England to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday. After everyone had boarded the plane in Vancouver, there seemed to be a delay. The reason was that my wheelchair had been destroyed. It had been put in a freight elevator with the door left open. The chair had been left with no brakes on. Once the elevator began to move, the chair, weighing 350 pounds, fell from 20 feet to the tarmac below. It could have caused major injury or killed somebody. Luckily, it didn't.
It's hard to describe the shock and panic I felt, even though I remember it vividly. I felt trapped. I was stuck on an airplane not knowing what I would do on the other end, my mobility gone. Everybody else would walk off to continue their day. Initially, I was given a manual wheelchair in Florida, which meant I needed someone to push me. After a few more days, a power wheelchair was found, but it was too small for me. I spent most of the holiday in bed. To this day, I have chronic hip pain from the injury caused from spending two weeks in a chair that did not fit.
When I got home, I continued to spend days in bed recovering. While another rental power chair was sourced that fit better, it didn't work particularly well, so I couldn't trust it outside the home.
Six weeks later, my father died in Oakville, Ontario. I couldn't go to his funeral. I was still in acute pain and had acute fatigue. I didn't have a wheelchair that I could travel with. Even if I could make it past those two obstacles, I couldn't face getting on a plane again so soon after losing my chair.
In total, it would be three months before I received a new wheelchair that fit me and worked. I cannot fault the customer service I received from WestJet in replacing my chair, but it simply takes that long to get a custom wheelchair that cost, at that time, $25,000.
That one small action of not securing my chair in that elevator cost me my dignity and independence for months and shook my confidence. It stopped me from attending my father's funeral and still causes me physical pain now.
Incredibly, it almost happened again on this journey. Time permitting, I'll tell you some more about that later.
Flying has so many risks to us. When a piece of equipment that a disabled person relies on is damaged, it's not like a suitcase being lost. It's an intrinsic part of who we are that's crucial to how we function. Being delayed might mean the medications or the meals we planned now don't work out, or mean a layover in a hotel room not equipped for us. Disabled people are 27% of the Canadian population, but I doubt we make up 27% of the people who fly.
I made a note to myself—I wrote this before I left home—to say that I travelled here with Leo, my service dog. It's his first time flying. Perhaps you could ask him how that went. We can talk about that as well.
I see that in the U.S., crucial work is being done to consider how wheelchairs can be brought onto planes. I think this is crucial. We have seating configurations in our wheelchairs that are purpose-designed for us, but on planes we have to leave them to go in with the luggage. I'm limited on how long I can fly by how long I can sit in a plane seat, when a seat that works perfectly well is elsewhere on the plane.
My chair was destroyed 10 years ago, and I see that little has changed. The stories in the news recently are just the ones that reached the media—mine never did, for example—and I'm sure there are many more.
I'll leave you with one all-encompassing recommendation—namely, that airlines provide an experience for disabled people that is safe and treats us with dignity and respect, where we can expect to get to the end of the flight with our equipment and our bodies in the same condition as when we departed, and that is, simply put, an equitable experience to the one everyone else has.
Thank you very much for your time today.
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