Ability to Care Understanding the role of care ethics in disability policy design in Canada

Abstract

For decades, persons with disabilities have advocated for a leadership role in shaping the policies that affect them. While Canada, along with the international community, has moved toward a greater recognition of the rights of persons with disabilities, there remains a major gap between what is needed and what public policies currently provide. To ameliorate this, disability policy design in Canada should move toward a participatory model, in which critical decisions should come from within the disability community. However, in advancing this new model, decisionmakers must ensure empathy in their approach, in order to subvert some of the risks that can be associated with participatory approaches to policy design. To do this, I argue for the use of feminist care ethics, which offers a conceptual framework by which participatory approaches to disability policy design can be constructed equitably, in order to meet the needs of both the disability community as well as their family/friend caregivers. I find that care ethics works to bolster and enhance existing scholarship in disability studies, and thus can act as a positive (and crucial) conduit to achieve justice for persons with disabilities in Canada.

Keywords: Policy design, participatory policy design, critical disability studies, disability policy, feminist policy, care ethics