Award-winning advocate for people with disabilities cherishes ’empowered’ life

By Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press

Paul Young says his parents brought him home from hospital expecting he might die as an infant due to the powerful seizures that pulsed through the left side of his body.

Instead, he went on to set a lifelong pattern of stubbornly defying the odds, surviving childhood and growing into an orator and advocate for Canadians living with intellectual and physical disabilities.

On July 13, the 72-year-old will receive the Meritorious Service Cross from the Governor General in recognition of his often feisty lobbying efforts.

“I believe people should be empowered, not just taken care of,” he said during a interview from his Sydney, N.S. home.

As a child, his cerebral palsy often forced him to go home from school for bed rest.

He recalls being mocked by other children, taunted as the “cross-eyed monkey,” thanks to thick glasses, or easily toppled over by a quick shove.

Meanwhile, he struggled with reading, never moving beyond a Grade 7 level of literacy.

When he told a social worker in Toronto about his dream of working at a radio station, he was advised that perhaps his best chance for a job would be as a dishwasher.

In the autobiographical speech he delivers across Canada and around the world, Young refers to a “cocoon of impossibility” that can wrap around the lives of people with disabilities — where relatives, governments and caregivers quietly guide them towards the margins of society.

His personal shift away from that fate dates from a medical appointment to treat a recurring nosebleed.

The doctor who examined him — Stewart Marsh— was a shareholder in CHER radio in Sydney, and after listening to Young’s blunt views on how the station’s music mix was a disaster, offered him a position in the record library.

It was a huge shift from making 15 cents per hour at a disability workshop where Young was resanding and repairing chairs.

In 1980, he went on to became a trainee at CBC radio and — with the mentorship of technician Walter Pretty — launched an 18-year career.

When he started, Young required five minutes to thread a tape onto a reel, but with practice he cut his time to a few seconds as reporters rushed into studios hurrying to make their deadlines.

“They had high expectations of me … and it forced me to rise to those expectations,” he recalls.

“When I’d screw something up, I’d be down for a few days. But I’d bounce back and away I’d go again.”

He says he started to attend meetings organized by advocacy groups for people with disabilities in the late 1970s, hoping to help others avoid lives of isolation.

In the early 1990s, Young became a founding member of the People First of Canada executive and then became national president of the advocacy group.

He spearheaded efforts to shift people to smaller residences in the community, improve employment opportunities, and to pressure the provinces to rethink their policies to give people with disabilities some say in their own care.

Young says by then he’d adopted the approach of the late psychologist Wolf Wolfensberger, who called for a wider integration of the disabled into “the good things of life” such as meaningful work.

Vici Clarke, an employee of People First in the 1990s, says under Young the organization gained more prominence in Ottawa and started to receive ongoing funding.

“He has a gift. He is able to motivate people,” she recalled, referring to his speaking tours.

Amidst the advocacy efforts, Young fought to transfer his own brother Tony, who also has severe cerebral palsy, from a large facility into a small options home in Sydney.

“I consider that my greatest achievement,” he says.

He remains critical of what he says is Nova Scotia’s slow progress towards the provision of improved housing and care in the community.

“They’ll tell you there are more group homes and more small options (homes) but the institutional thinking is still there,” he said.

However, Young says he is fatigued by the arguments, and he intends to spend more time with his wife Marilyn, visit with his neighbours and play golf.

And in July, he’ll drive to Halifax to accept his recognition.

“Here I am today, a citizen of the country getting an award from the Governor General. … Everything I’ve done, I’ve contributed, whether in radio or advocacy. And nobody thought I could do that,” he said.

Top Stories

Top Stories

Most Watched Today