Congratulations Brad!

“Organized by the The Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons (CFPDP), this year’s Hall of Fame inductees will continue a great tradition of leadership, advocacy and athletic excellence. In 1980, Brad McCannell incurred a C6/7 spinal cord injury and became a wheelchair user. He was 27 and co-owner of Western Canada’s largest television production company. “I had to switch from being a cameraman/director to being a writer/producer almost overnight,” he says. “So, there was a professional toll in addition to the obvious emotional impact that becoming a quadriplegic carried.” McCannell remained in television production until 1990, when he became Project Manager for Independence ‘92, then the largest disability congress and exposition ever held. “Up until then I had lived quite a sheltered existence far away from disability issues. I wasn’t a member of any association or any activist group and then I came face to face with 2,700 delegates from 93 countries, each of them telling personal stories of how they were being held back by their own built environments.” Armed with the knowledge that people with disabilities were not the problem, McCannell began a second career in accessibility consulting, entering the field when professionals were few and far between. He has since become one of Canada’s foremost experts in universal design. “Back then, accessibility was not considered at all as a line item or a priority in any construction project,” he recalls. McCannell began convincing the industry to consider accessibility from the beginning and helped turn that philosophy into reality with Vancouver International Airport’s International Terminal in the early 1990s. With McCannell’s guidance, YVR became a leader in universal design, introducing accessibility features decades before building codes required them, including amplified handsets and adult-dimension change tables. It also pioneered airport firsts such as accessible washroom emergency call buttons, post-security dog relief areas, floor surface textures and soundscaping for wayfinding, public address systems that accommodate people using hearing aids, and sign language greetings in ASL and ISL. Airport exit surveys focused on older adults, seniors and other people with disabilities showed McCannell the approach was working. “It was great,’ were the responses. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ was the answer. And that is, of course, the perfect answer. They don’t know because they weren’t handled separately; they didn’t have to use special counters; they didn’t have to declare their disabilities at every decision point. Everything just worked.” This philosophy was central to McCannell’s work on the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. His involvement helped establish meaningful access as a requirement and led directly to the creation of the International Paralympic Committee’s Access Working Group. “As the Primary Access Consultant for the 2010 Games, it was probably the most rewarding project in my entire career. Because of the commitment from the beginning, we were able to achieve amazing things. Over 200 power wheelchair users lining the route of the downhill ski run in Whistler; specially designed units that kept wheelchairs level and stable while going up 30° slopes, so wheelchair users could participate in the events on Cypress Mountain; designing the Athletes Villages as legacy structures so that after the Games, appropriate housing for people with disabilities would remain.” When Alexandre Bilodeau won Canada’s first Olympic gold medal on home soil, his brother Frédéric, whose battles with disability Alexandre had publicly credited with inspiring him, was right there to celebrate. The practical application of universal design delivered integrated accessible seating, ensuring his brother could be front and centre for the historic moment. “Watching those two hug and celebrate made me feel like we did something good and real and meaningful.” McCannell later developed the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification (RHFAC) program, an innovative rating system that has transformed how accessibility is measured in the built environment. The idea was inspired by the success of LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification system. “I recognized immediately that’s exactly what we needed for accessibility, but the only way to make that work was to follow the LEED model and create a standardized certification program that offered common language, common methodology to identify barriers, that was rooted in standardized training, so that everybody was speaking the same language when they referred to accessibility.” He adds, “With more than 800 industry professionals already taking our course and classes and online courses booked up well into the future, right across the country, that culture shift is firmly implanted. If nothing else, maybe the RHFAC can keep them from building new mistakes while we address the old ones.”