Lieutenant Governor David Onley delivers the throne speech at the Ontario Legislature in Toronto on Feb. 19, 2013,Chris Young/The Canadian Press
David Onley, who died in Toronto on Jan. 14 at 72, was the lieutenant-governor of Ontario for seven years and was the first person with a disability to hold the job. When he was appointed in 2007, he promised to help other disabled people in the province and started with improving the accessibility of Ontario’s Legislative Building itself. The steps to the building couldn’t accommodate his motorized scooter so a special ramp was installed before he was sworn in.
“My dream is of a province where disability rights are advanced, not only for those with classically defined physical disabilities but also for those so-called invisible disabilities,” he said in 2007. But in 2019, he wrote a scathing report criticizing how few promises the provincial government had kept when it came to helping disabled people.
His other pledge as lieutenant-governor was to focus on computer literacy for First Nations children in Ontario.
The lieutenant-governor’s job is to represent the Crown in Ontario and is mostly ceremonial, but does have some real constitutional power. Mr. Onley faced two crises during his tenure. One involved premier Dalton McGuinty calling him on a Friday in October, 2012, asking for a meeting on Monday. Mr. Onley knew right away what that meant: The Premier wanted to prorogue the session. The lieutenant-governor spent the weekend with constitutional experts deciding in advance on a course of action.
“We had a pretty strong sense that something was up, and it was probably going to be prorogation,” Mr. Onley later recalled. “Discussions began at that very point and actually continued on the following morning well before meeting with the Premier. He then acted out his part, and I acted out mine.”
The prorogation angered the opposition. But Mr. Onley said that, from his point of view, there was only one choice to be made.
“The viceregal officer is not the constitutional adviser to the premier. It’s the other way around,” he said. “So, when the premier comes in and says ‘I want to do this,’ it’s not illegal, it’s not unconstitutional. Since it’s neither of those, he or she has the perfect right to make that request, and at that point, it’s pretty much the obligation of the viceroy to accede.”
The second incident took place while the votes of Ontario’s June, 2014, election were being counted. It looked as if premier Kathleen Wynne might end up with a minority government, in which case the Conservative Opposition Leader, Tim Hudak, could bring a vote of non-confidence in the government. Consequently the lieutenant-governor could have asked Mr. Hudak to form a government without calling an election. It might have been constitutionally correct, but it would have been political dynamite.
“Even as I met with the constitutional advisers in the days and weeks ahead of that, we were very, very aware that we were potentially going into very unusual territory,” he said.
On election night, Mr. Onley sat at his Scarborough home watching the results and exchanging a flurry of text messages and emails with his advisers.
Ms. Wynne squeaked in with a majority, averting a constitutional crisis and relieving tension for Mr. Onley.
David Charles Onley was born in Midland, Ont., on June 12, 1950, the first of five children in the family. His father, Charles, was a lawyer; his mother, Gwenyth (née Woolger), was a homemaker and a strong advocate for her disabled son, David.
He contracted polio in 1953, when he was three years old. He was one of 8,878 people to suffer from the disease in Canada that year, the largest number the country had ever seen. The Salk polio vaccine inoculation program was introduced two years later, dramatically reducing the number of new cases.
Mr. Onley, pictured in 1989, was co-anchor and weatherman on CITY-TV morning news,Courtesy of CITY-TV
When David was eight years old, his family moved to Toronto, where he could receive better medical care, including several surgeries.
He attended local schools in Scarborough, including Midland Avenue Collegiate. At school, he wore leg braces, helped with crutches and sometimes used a wheelchair. In spite of being paralyzed below the waist, he was active at school.
“He enjoyed playing hockey with the kids. He was the goalie because he could just stand there, and at certain points of his young life, he was fairly mobile,” his wife, Ruth Ann Onley, says. “He played in the theatre at high school and enjoyed a part he played in the musical Oliver.”
Mr. Onley adapted to life with his disability, and so did the other students at his high school.
“David had a larger-than-life personality. He was very engaging and such an amicable person that people were willing to help and push his wheelchair around a bit, and he had quite a group of friends. Instead of being marginalized, I think he engaged with people, and they engaged back,” Mrs. Onley said.
It also helped that David’s mother was a strong woman.
“She was a pit bull. A gentle pit bull, but as the mother of a disabled person she advocated for things for him at school, and one of them was an elevator. The family he came from was a very important influence on his life, particularly his mother,” Mrs. Onley said.
After high school, Mr. Onley went to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus because it was accessible and near the family home. Among other things, he started the radio station there.
Finding work was difficult when he graduated, and he wrote a successful novel, Shuttle: A Shattering Novel Of Disaster In Space. That helped open a few doors, and he started working as a radio announcer at the all-news station CKO and Toronto’s CFRB.
His big break came when he was hired at CITY-TV by Moses Znaimer, who was already breaking television stereotypes by putting visible minorities on air. The two men had a shared interest in space.
“I met and hired David Onley for an important, on-camera job at CITY-TV and never mentioned his disability. It was the right thing to do and the smart thing to do,” Mr. Znaimer said in a statement.
It was 1984, and Mr. Onley started doing the weather. He was a natural broadcaster, popular with viewers, and he moved up to reporting news stories in the field and anchoring news programs. “It sent a message to TV viewers everywhere that my physical shortcomings were irrelevant,” Mr. Onley told The Globe and Mail in 2007.
As he told the writer of his University of Toronto profile, “I wasn’t hired as the token disabled guy. I was hired by CITY-TV because I had the talent they were looking for.”
From the start, there was no thought given to hiding his disability, as there had been with others, such as U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, also paralyzed from polio, and one of Mr. Onley’s heroes. He had a picture of Roosevelt in his office. The American president’s disability was always hidden from the public.
Even when he was reporting in the field, the camera would take a wide shot to show Mr. Onley’s motorized scooter.
In September 2007, Mr. Onley was named the 28th lieutenant-governor of Ontario on the recommendation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“David Onley is a respected author, broadcaster and tireless champion for persons with disabilities,” Mr. Harper said at the time. “Through this work, he has demonstrated the qualities needed for such an important position.”
Shortly after being named lieutenant-governor, Mr. Onley participated in a question and answer session in which he outlined his views on what disability meant.
“I fundamentally believe that words are very, very important. In this case, the word accessibility has come to mean wheelchair parking spots, curb cuts and automatic doors,” Mr. Onley said. “And while it is all of these things, it is much, much more. Accessibility, quite frankly, is a right. And that is why I believe we need to start using the term in its complete and full meaning. And it is that which allows someone to achieve their full potential.”
Mr. Onley and his wife Ruth Ann during a farewell dinner at the Royal Ontario Museum on July 16, 2014.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
During his time as lieutenant-governor, he travelled across the province, often with his wife, though Mrs. Onley went north on her own to First Nations communities to speak about the aboriginal literacy program. It was too difficult for Mr. Onley to get around in northern fly-in communities. When Mr. Onley’s five-year term was up it was extended for another two years.
In retirement, Mr. Onley lectured at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, teaching the history of the lieutenant-governor’s function in government and talking about the politics of disability.
In 2018 Mr. Onley was asked to write a report about the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), passed in 2005. His report was published in January, 2019, and Mr. Onley pulled no punches, saying little had been done in 14 years.
“For most disabled persons, Ontario is not a place of opportunity but one of countless, dispiriting, soul-crushing barriers,” Mr. Onley wrote. “Despite enormous efforts by untold legions of people to implement this law and deliver on its promise – from standards development committees and the consultations they involved, to those who have laboured to improve accessibility in obligated institutions – the results are highly selective and barely detectable. One thing you can see when you look around Ontario’s public buildings and shopping malls is the blue wheelchair symbol. This is misleading. It gives the impression everything is accessible when in fact – though there are some accessible features – this province is mostly inaccessible.”
Mr. Onley leaves his wife, Ruth Ann; three sons, Jonathan, Robert and Michael; and six grandchildren. A granddaughter, Sarah, predeceased him.