Catherine Frazee: Dispatches from Disabled Country

Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta and this is The Pulse. For a long time, I shrank from identifying as disabled. I worked so hard to pass as able-bodied. I'm not sure how convincing I was with the magnifier to read books in large print, but I did try. I wasn't sure if I wanted to belong to a disability community, would I buckle under the pressure of otherness? Would I feel like I was different? Would I be stigmatized? It's only when I first got to university and found common cause with other disabled people that I first internalized the notion that disability identity could and is a source of pride and strength. If disability was a country, I was finally willing to be a citizen. Today we discuss disabled country. It's time to put to your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta. My guest today needs no introduction. My guest is in fact Catherine Frazee, known to many of us as a longtime disability advocate, activist and writer. Catherine is also Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson University. Catherine has recently compiled a new book, a collection of some of Catherine's writing over the years, going back many decades actually. The book is called Dispatches from Disabled Country. Catherine, hello and welcome to the program. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Catherine Frazee:
Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Joeita Gupta:
What does the title mean, Dispatches from Disabled Country?

Catherine Frazee:
Well, I think that your introduction set this up just perfectly because we choose, many of us as disabled people, at a certain point in the trajectory of our lives to embrace our citizenship in disabled country. We can talk about that a bit more, but I think the title, which was the brainchild of one of my editors, Michael Osimi and Christine Kelly, the title is really intended to evoke a sense of messages, perhaps disparate messages, certainly touching on different themes and very much representing different points in time. Messages that comes from across the way, come from the adventures, the explorations and the discoveries that I've been privileged to be part of as my journey through disabled country.

Joeita Gupta:
The book is a collection of your writing and some of your writing goes back over 20 years. What are some of the themes explored in the volume? If you think about all the writing taken together, what are some of the ideas and themes that come across in the book?

Catherine Frazee:
That's a really interesting question. I think in the early years, as I've said, this is a record of my journey in the early years of the pieces really represent discovering the world of disability, the scholarship of disability, the history of disabled people, and being excited about those discoveries and finding ways to introduce those discoveries and those ideas to, at the time perhaps, primarily non-disabled audiences. Then over time, as I became more involved in the disability rights movement and the disability arts and culture movement, they represent, I think, streamers out identity famous of what it means to have human rights, [inaudible 00:04:48] of the struggle, for recognition and protection of our human rights and themes of how we express our humanity. How we contribute to the art, to culture, to history, to scholarship, to philosophy, to law, to many fields of endeavor.
Then I guess, a third area we highlight is the relationship that we have to the medical world. Much of our identity as disability rights activists or people who identify as citizens of disabled country, it may be premised and the idea of a social model of disability that sees our lives and our boundaries as something more than a medical problem. I think there are challenges to the dominance of medicine, [inaudible 00:06:08] that are perhaps also evidently when you take a big picture, look at the check.

Joeita Gupta:
You're such a prolific writer and you've written so much over the years, poetry, you have a blog given so many lectures. How did you decide what to include and more importantly, what to leave out? I know if it were me, I'd want to put everything in.

Catherine Frazee:
I had a lot of help with my editors. In fact, I've had a conversation with Michael and Christine, the book's editors years ago, and they have encouraged me to write a book and that they were resisting published. I was teaching, I was very heavily involved in activist work and I didn't have time. I'm a great procrastinator and I write when there was a deadline, but when there was an open invitation, that's a lot harder for me to deliver. To make a long story short, at one point Michael and Christine came to me and after years of cajoling me to write a book and me coming up empty-handed, they said, "You've written a lot. Why don't you give us access to all of your files, your lectures, your public addresses, your creative writing. Just give it all to us and we'll pick." They may be [inaudible 00:07:57] because I know you're right to reach it to a certain extent.
You have a certain fondness maybe for everything you've written by overtime time. Oh, but it doesn't all hold up and your ideas change. I have to say, when I looked at the whole package, my favourite piece is almost always the last piece I wrote. Deciding what else to include would've been very difficult. Some of their selections, I thought, "Really, I put this old just now there," but then I began to understand the concept that I give them a credit for of chronicling a journey and showing transition around evolution thought in the course of not just my lifetime, but a few decades of our movement and giving us a sense of the continuing evolution outside of what it ought to be disabled.

Joeita Gupta:
You have in the book the transcript of your speech at the vigil for Tracy Latimer. That was in the mid-1990s. The movement has, the time has rolled by, and I'm sure you have some thoughts about how the disability rights movement has evolved in all of these years, as has your thinking. How has the disability rights movement in Canada evolved? If you look back to the early to mid-nineties when maybe you got first involved to where things are at now, what sort of changes have you seen?

Catherine Frazee:
There's so much, so much that remains very deeply embedded in the ableist structures. I think some of the things that have evolved are understanding of the complexity and the tenacity of the problem of ableism and language for talking about barriers and discrimination and oppression has evolved to keep up with the more and more sophisticated [inaudible 00:10:33] analysis of the social problems around disability. I think our appreciation of diversity has thankfully, begun to evolve. That's a long way to go, but we're might I suppose every other social grouping that we found to be initially constituted by dominant voices, whose dominant voices are even in the disability sector in the early days were white owned male. I think we have evolved to understand that there is much more to be heard, that there are many more to be heard from and much more to be learned from our [inaudible 00:11:32] approach to our world.
I think in terms of, well, you referred to the [inaudible 00:11:44] years on those were profoundly formative years. For me, I'm from marrying disabled people of my generation. We found in ourselves and in our collective movement a strength and a fierceness and a grit to fight to defend the lives of disabled people and to demand justice for people like Traci Latimer. We haven't ever lost that sense of collective power once I think we may have speak for myself, what I perhaps naively believed was a full and unequivocal victory in the outcome of the Latimer case ie, [inaudible 00:12:50] and the arrest and incarceration of Robert Latimer. It wasn't that simple. Time has proven that the devaluation of disabled people's lives has continued, it has deep roots and multiple manifestations. Part of our evolution, our mind anyway, has been learning how very complex and permissions those under forces or undercurrents of our culture are and how very hard we have to work to uproot and resist them. Those are just a few thoughts. There's much more, that can of course be said about what has informed in the past 30 or 40 years, but those are the things that rise to the surface.

Joeita Gupta:
When I think about some of what you just said about the devaluation of the lives of people with disabilities, one of the things that has troubled me a lot in the last few years is the conversation around medical assistance and dying. Spent a lot of time, I produced a documentary about it for this channel. I did a whole lot of other research and there's such a this schism in Canadian society about assisted suicide and people who think it's a dignified way to end someone's life versus people with disabilities and advocates who are saying that it isn't the best option out there. In one of the essays in the book you are noted as saying that the law is now the fact of the land. You're not really ever, maybe we won't see a change in the law, but we still have to tussle with many of the debates around medical assistance and dying. Where are you at in terms of the tussle or in terms of trying to resolve some of the debates that the legalization of assisted death have spawned in Canadian society?

Catherine Frazee:
Yeah, thanks for that question, Joeita. Indeed as you know, the entire first section of the book is really primarily focused on this issue of medical assistance and dying. I'm very concerned about, and I do agree, I certainly said in one of the essays in the book that the Supreme Court's decision on charter is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, we thought the decision in Rodriguez was here to stay. It was 20 years before [inaudible 00:16:11], so 20 years from now, we can't say, but for now, [inaudible 00:16:16] is the law of the land, but we are all [inaudible 00:16:20] I think begin is in our various ways of interpreting [inaudible 00:16:29] and certainly my interpretation, and you can read about it, there are certainly legal analysts who would support the proposition that [inaudible 00:16:49] is meant to be a system of, or the medical assistance in dying is meant to be a way of easing people who are already in the process of dying to toward deaths by giving them a little more control over the precise time and manner of that death.
I would argue that that was what we had in [inaudible 00:17:22] that it was a law that as the attorney general at the time said, trust and delegate balance between the requirements for respecting autonomy and the requirements for protecting the rights and the dignity of all persons. [inaudible 00:17:52], the original interpretation of [inaudible 00:17:57] was that may be available to people who were approaching only the end of their natural lives. Whether do you have lived your life as a disabled person or a non-disabled person, it would allow, there was no discrimination. If you were reaching the end of that life and if you chose to bring it to a tourism differently, then allowing your illness to run its course, then that doctor would be authorized at your Red Cross to assist you to die. Since then, starting in 2020, we have seen a relentless expansion of the learning and the reach of medically-assisted death.
We now have a new law that I don't think is here to stay. I think it's a law that's very flawed and hasn't been yet challenged at the Supreme Court. That is the law that came into being in 2021 that expanded medical assistance and dying beyond persons who are actually dying to any person with a disabling medical condition. Now, it's still not available to a healthy non-disabled person. It's restricted only to persons who are disabled in some way. That's where I think we have entered [inaudible 00:20:03] that violates the human rights of disabled people and beyond that, of course, there are many further very controversial expansions proposed for this legislation expanding under the realm of mental illness, just expanding into the lives of people under the age of 18, so minors and expanding around the edges of actually consenting or asking for it by considering the possibility of making [inaudible 00:20:52] are and won't get into all of that complex territory.
I will say, to answer your request Joeita, that this is where all of the controversies, the [inaudible 00:21:09], the schism as you indicate that has continued and our debates on this issue, really centers on how we define medical assistance and dying. Is it for the dying or is it for the living? Who is going to be rich? Who is going to be caught up in the expansion of this regime? How will doctors be accountable for [inaudible 00:21:57] and actions that go on in very private spheres? How much will we tolerate as a society as we discover more and more cases where people are supposedly choosing to die, but for reason they have very little to do with their medical condition and everything to do with their social condition. What will be the limits of medical assistance and dying? If we aren't clear about those limits, what will be the costs, our human lives, but also to our social family?

Joeita Gupta:
I always find myself wondering, if we make medical assistance and dying available to more and more people, what happens to our social obligations to create a world where people are not devalued because of their disabilities? What happens to that social contract that we might all have? Anyways, that's just me. That's just my thoughts about it. I'm just looking at the clock as well, Catherine, it's just about time to go. In a nutshell, you're probably at about 30 seconds. What advice would you give to a young person, a person who has recently realized their citizenship in disabled country and who would like to stay in disabled country to remain there without feeling burnt out or pessimistic? How can they continue to find joy in their lives?

Catherine Frazee:
Thanks for the question. To the person or those persons, be proud of who you are. Take care of yourselves and of each other, and you'll find as you meet more of your kind in disabled country, you'll find people who inspire you, people who care for you, people who support you, and people who are cheering you on. Welcome to Disabled Country and may you flourish as I have.

Joeita Gupta:
Catherine Frazee. Thank you very much for speaking to me today. It was a pleasure having you on the program.

Catherine Frazee:
Thanks so much, Joeita. My pleasure.

Joeita Gupta:
Catherine Frazee is a longtime disability activist, author and has recently published a collection of her works dispatches from Disabled Country. I do hope you have a chance to read the book. It's in short essays and other formats. You don't have to read it in one go, but a book that gathers together in one place, years if not decades of wisdom. If you'd like to get in touch with us with suggestions or future programming, or if you pick up Catherine's book Dispatches from Disabled Country and you want to let us know what you thought about it, you can do so in a couple of ways. You can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. Don't forget to leave your permission to play the audio on the program. You could also find us on Twitter now X @AMIaudio. Use the hashtag #pulseAMI so that they know that the tweet is meant for this program.
Of course, if you feel like 280 characters isn't long enough, you are welcome to write us an email, write to feedback @aami.ca. We would love to hear from you. I will try to read out some of the great comments we get on YouTube and other places as well if I get a chance, but it has been a really wonderful hearing from so many of you and hearing your feedback. Please don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel as well as to the podcast if that's where you picked up this program. Our videographer today has been Jake Kemp. In for Marco Aflalo, today our technical producer is Jordan Steeves. Ryan Delahanty, coordinator for AMI podcasts. Andy Frank is the manager for AMI Audio, and I've been your host Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.