National conference speakers tell safety leaders that workplace culture, not compliance, drives real disability inclusion
Roughly 27 per cent of Canadian adults live with a disability, and one in three Canadian workers currently has a high mental health risk – numbers that speakers at a national policy conference in Toronto said should move disability inclusion and psychological health squarely onto the health and safety agenda, not just the human resources one.
The CSA Policy Pathways Conference: Shaping Healthy and Inclusive Workplaces, held November 3 in Toronto and hosted by CSA Group’s Public Policy Centre, opened with a fireside chat between Paula Allen, global leader and vice-president of research, insights and strategic communications at TELUS Health, and Stephanie Cadieux, Canada’s Chief Accessibility Officer, followed by a panel on advancing disability inclusion in the workforce, moderated by Eve Adams, executive director and president of the Canadian Business Disability Inclusion Network (CBDIN).
Culture, not compliance, is the real barrier
Both Allen and Cadieux argued that good intentions aren’t the same as inclusion. Cadieux, whose role was created under the Accessible Canada Act, said progress has been uneven across sectors, and that many organizations still frame disability and mental health accommodations as legal duty-to-accommodate obligations rather than genuine inclusion – a distinction she said forces employees through anxiety-inducing disclosure processes that signal compliance rather than welcome.
Allen pointed to a sharp rise in organizational change as a driver of workplace stress, noting restructuring cycles have compressed from roughly every five years to every four months in some organizations, eroding employees’ sense of predictability. She’s made a similar point before: TELUS Health’s warning on AI-driven burnout among younger workers, in which Allen said “burnout among workers under 40 is significantly higher,” and that employers need to ensure AI adoption doesn’t raise quotas and erode the very gains it promises.
The cost case is steep. A report co-authored with the Institute for Work & Health put the annual cost of poor mental health to the Canadian economy at $180 billion, with employers absorbing roughly $110 billion of that directly, and 86 per cent of those costs concentrated in crisis and exit stages, such as disability leave and workforce exits, rather than prevention.
Rethinking the duty to accommodate
Panel 1 pushed further into the mechanics of inclusion. Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai, chief executive officer of IDEA-STEM, argued the existing duty-to-accommodate framework was built for a world where roughly one in 100 workers needed support, not for a workforce where disability prevalence is approaching a third. He invoked the “curb cut effect,” the idea that accessibility measures built for a minority – larger monitors, captions, flexible schedules – end up benefiting far more workers, including aging employees and caregivers.
Tammy Morris, accessibility and neuroinclusion leader at EY Canada, shared internal data showing 70 per cent of the firm’s long-term disability mental health claims were filed by women, with half of those claimants under 25. She proposed treating a repeated accommodation request as a “stop work rule” of sorts: when the same request recurs, she said, organizations should pause and ask why the environment wasn’t designed to meet that need in the first place, a framing that echoes how safety professionals already treat recurring near-misses. On that front, why safety professionals should take ownership of disability management is worth revisiting for OHS teams weighing where accommodation sits on their own mandate.
Neil Belanger, chief executive officer of Indigenous Disability Canada (IDC) and the B.C. Aboriginal Network on Disability Society (BCANDS), raised compounding barriers facing Indigenous workers with disabilities, including transportation gaps and anti-Indigenous racism, and noted a 2000s-era federal commitment to full employment for work-ready persons with disabilities by 2020 went unmet.
What safety leaders can take back to the floor
For OHS professionals, the throughline across both sessions was that disability inclusion and psychological health and safety are converging into a single risk category rather than two separate HR files. CSA Group’s own national standard for psychological health and safety in the workplace already gives safety committees a structured starting point for folding both into existing management systems.
Concrete, low-cost steps raised at the conference included sharing interview questions 24 hours in advance, delivering assistive technology before an employee’s start date, and offering a pre-start workplace tour, all framed as removing barriers before they generate an accommodation request at all. Cadieux’s recurring recommendation was a “culture of yes”: defaulting to finding a way to say yes to accommodation requests rather than routing them through lengthy verification processes, which she said reduces both friction and the stigma attached to disclosure.
