‘This is not just for me, this is for everybody’

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This article was published 02/01/2024 (660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A polio survivor who’s been using a wheelchair for nearly 40 years is among those seeing her independence slip away because of a lack of provincial funding.

Joy Gardner is lobbying the province for changes to Manitoba Possible’s wheelchair services program, funded under the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority via provincial health and families budgets.

For months, the 73-year-old Steinbach resident has been trying to get the program to cover the cost of installing a power lift in her wheelchair. She argues she and other wheelchair users wouldn’t need to rely so heavily on other health-care services if they had the assistive devices they need.

“This is not just for me, this is for everybody. It’s a total disaster what’s going on,” Gardner said.

After launching an unsuccessful argument in the summer before the Manitoba Health appeal board — which ultimately decided such matters aren’t in its jurisdiction — and approaching her local MLA (Kelvin Goertzen), Gardner received a letter Dec. 15 from Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine, stating funding the wheelchair program is a “top priority.”

“We are looking into funding options to improve the Manitoba wheelchair program as soon as possible,” states the letter signed by Fontaine and copied to Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara.

Gardner said much of the letter reads as boilerplate and hopes action will follow.

She is considering pursuing a human rights complaint in hopes of creating policy changes that allow the wheelchair program to be properly funded or to go into a deficit in order to provide the mobility devices people need.

“It’s time for change,” Gardner said. “You don’t deny a client the ability to use their chair because you don’t have the funds. You have to have the funds.”

The power lift device was provided free of charge when she received her first wheelchair under the program nearly 20 years ago. It allowed her to safely raise the seat of her wheelchair in order to do basic tasks, such as transfer herself to the toilet or to bed, cook at a stove top and do laundry.

When she received a replacement wheelchair through the program in August 2022, it didn’t come with a power lift.

Without the lift, she’s suffered three falls — and has been seriously injured — over the past few months while trying to transfer herself out of her wheelchair.

Now, a home care worker comes in to do laundry because Gardner can’t. (Her husband Ken is dealing with Stage 4 lung cancer.)

Considering the cost savings for home care, the lift device would be paid for in less than two years if the WRHA would provide it, Gardner said.

It comes with a hefty price tag — $3,500 — and the WRHA’s argument has been it must only provide basic mobility devices through Manitoba Possible’s wheelchair program. Add-on devices such as seat cushions and power lifts are considered extras, and they’re no longer donated to clients because they’re commercially available in Manitoba.

Without the lift, her new chair is “no good to me, I can’t do anything with it,” Gardner argued.

Add-on devices shouldn’t be considered extras if they are crucial to the wheelchair user’s ability to use the device properly and have basic mobility, she said.

It’s the kind of thing decision makers often don’t understand unless they see how people with disabilities go about their days, Gardner added.

“People don’t want to die, they want to be able to live, but they want to be able to get up in the morning and have a good day… You have to be able to give people hope,” she said. “We live in one of the rich countries of the world and we shouldn’t have people suffering like this.”

Contracting polio at three years old, and then developing post-polio conditions that led to her using a wheelchair in the 1980s, Gardner said she has always been called “resilient.”

She calls herself stubborn and her ability to rely on herself to get things done is a point of pride. She doesn’t want to depend on home care for things she can do herself.

Despite letters advocating on her behalf from occupational therapists, support from her local MLA and even an acknowledgement from the health appeal board that a “chair power lift will be necessary to continue independent living,” Gardner hasn’t been able to change things.

However, she’s still fighting. A human rights complaint “will be the next step.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca