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Q&A with David C. Onley

Photo by Geoffrey McMurray

David C. Onley, the 28th and current Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, was in London Saturday afternoon to present the Queen’s Cup at the 100th playing of the game at Western’s Thompson Arena.

The Lieutenant Governor is the Monarchy’s official representative in Ontario and is responsible for a number of governmental duties including inducting individuals into the Order of Ontario.

Onley, who was diagnosed with polio when he was three-year-old and suffers from partial paralysis, is Ontario’s first Lieutenant Governor with a visible disability. He has use of his hands and arms but requires an electric scooter to travel.

The 61-year-old former television journalist has been a vocal champion of issues affecting Ontario’s approximately 1.5 million disabled residents.

Onley studied political science at the University of Toronto but was awarded an honourary doctorate in law from Western in 2008.

Gazette Associate Editor Arden Zwelling talked to Onley during the second intermission of the Queen’s Cup about hockey and accessibility in sport.

Gazette: It must be nice when your job brings you out to watch a hockey game. I’m sure you enjoy doing things like this.

David C. Onley: Oh definitely — especially for a major event like this. It doesn’t happen that often actually. I was in London during the summer for the opening of the Special Olympics. That was great. I really enjoyed that. And now I get to come back and it’s great to a part of, really, a landmark championship.

Gaz: Hockey has been getting a lot of negative press lately with some unfortunate on-ice incidents at the professional level. It must be a good feeling to do something like this that reminds people what’s great about the game.

DCO: Exactly. I really like watching OUA hockey. The rules and the structuring of the OUA are great. This is every bit as entertaining of a game as you could want to see. There’s hard checks. There’s crisp plays. Overall, there’s just a great flow to the game.

Gaz: You’ve been very involved with sport over your tenure as Lieutenant Governor, especially when it comes to things like the Special Olympics and the Paralympics. How important is sport to what you do?

DCO: I think it’s very important — especially when it comes to the Paralympics and the Parapan-Am Games that are coming up in 2015. It gives people a chance to see people with disabilities in a completely different light. Especially a year ago with the Paralympics Games in Vancouver — there was unprecedented TV coverage. We got to see these athletes perform. And people got to the point of realizing that these are amazing athletes who just happen to have a disability as opposed to a disabled person who is also an athlete.

Gaz: Do you think it’s really important that people make that distinction? That these are athletes first and disabled individuals second.

DCO: The distinction is very important and I think it does help. In terms of people in everyday life, all sorts of people have disabilities. Over 15 per cent of our population has either a physical disability or a so called invisible disability — an internal condition of some sort. But the majority of people with disabilities are able to overcome them and have very productive lives. The handicap is really what other people think. The handicap is a bad attitude from someone else or a bad design or choosing not the hire somebody only because they have a disability. So it’s great when you get to see disabled people in a completely different light, especially in the world of international and national sport. Such as the World Sledge Hockey Championships which are coming up [in London] in a few weeks.

Gaz: Absolutely. That’s a really significant event in the paralympic community and it’s fitting that it’s in London after the Special Olympics were here just last summer.

DCO: Definitely. For London to be holding the World Sledge Hockey Championship, that’s huge. I was talking to one of the local sledge players here today. We were talking about tournaments that are all over southern Ontario and the United States and what a great community it is. So to have it here is great.

Gaz: Your championing of accessibility is obviously well known. Where would you like to see accessibility in sport go in the next five to ten years?

DCO: Where I’d like to see it go is where I think it will go, really. I think it is simply going to continue to grow. It gives young people, both guys and gals, who have some kind of a disability the opportunity to say: ‘hey, I can be involved in athletics.’ Whether it’s sit skiing or swimming or whatever competition you’re interested in doing. You know, (Canadian paralympian) Rick Hansen has a great saying that I’ve heard from him at various occasions and events. He says that nowhere in the definition of the world athlete is the term ‘able bodied.’ And it’s true. It really, really is true.

Gaz: It absolutely is. And you think about how many professional athletes play through disabilities. They may just be hidden or aren’t spoken about as much. They aren’t as obvious as Rick Hansen’s but they do exist and those people can still be role models.

DCO: Exactly. It’s not really what’s happened to you. It’s what you do with what you’ve got left. You think back sometime ago to a player like Bobby Orr. You know, the guy had to wear braces on both legs in order to play hockey. Was he disabled? Well, most would say no. But technically he was. And there are plenty of other players that require insulin and things like that.

Gaz: One of your big initiatives for accessibility in sport is the Governor’s Games. Tell me a little about that.

DCO: Well, we hold the Lieutenant Governor’s games every year at Variety Village in Toronto. It was started by one of my predecessors John Black Aird in the 1980’s and it’s been going strong ever since. It’s an amazing opportunity to bring young people with a total range of disabilities together. We have this large field house facility which is completely accessible and has both able bodied and disabled members who belong to the Variety Village. Every year we put on a great tournament.

Gaz: Do you think that’s one of the biggest things? Providing that ‘opportunity’ for disabled people to be involved in sport.

DCO: I absolutely think so. It’s not that long ago that the accessibility things that we take for granted today like wheelchair parking spots, ramps and elevators simply didn’t exist. And now they do and it’s giving people opportunity every day.

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