Rethinking Disabilities Toronto 2025

Rethinking Disabilities is expanding to 5 cities in 2025 – Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg—bringing critical conversations on workplace disability inclusion to new audiences. This year’s theme, “Transforming the Workplace for People with Disabilities,” will explore how organizations can drive meaningful change and create truly inclusive work environments.

Overview of Rethinking Disabilities Toronto 2025

The event theme is, “Beyond Compliance – Building a Disability-Confident Workforce”. Despite decades of progress, people with disabilities still face significant barriers to employment, from hiring biases to workplace cultures that are not fully inclusive. Rethinking Disabilities Toronto 2025 will explore how organizations can shift from viewing accessibility as a legal requirement to embedding it as a strategic advantage. Through expert speakers, we’ll examine how businesses can cultivate disability confidence, create equitable career pathways, and unlock the potential of an untapped talent pool.

This event will bring together HR leaders and practitioners, executives, and advocates to discuss tangible solutions for making workplaces more inclusive. Attendees will gain insights into employment best practices, leadership development for employees with disabilities, and innovative hiring approaches that drive business success. Together, we will challenge outdated perceptions and build a future where employment is truly inclusive for all.


A unique feature of this year’s series is the book tour for Max Brault’s groundbreaking new book, The Race to the Starting Line. 

The book delves into the Accessible Canada Act; one of the most transformative laws in Canada since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the work still needed to make accessibility a reality for all. Each Rethinking Disabilities event will spotlight a specific chapter of the book that is most relevant to workplace inclusion, sparking meaningful discussions and actionable insights.

Join us as we challenge outdated perspectives, share best practices, and work together to build a future where people with disabilities can thrive in every workplace.

Event Details
Sarah Ennor
Speaker, Lawyer & Founder
Growth Counsel
Lauren Pires
Invisible Disability Speaker
Max Brault
President/CEO
The Accommodation Councilors of Canada Network
Jeff Waldman
Founder
ScaleHR

It’s estimated that up to 80% of disabilities are invisible —and most employees with disabilities won’t disclose unless they feel safe enough. In this session, award-winning inspirational speaker and internationally-recognized disability advocate Lauren Pires shares her journey of working for over a decade at one of the largest South Asian festivals in Canada – while hiding the rare neuromuscular disorder she was born with.

Through personal stories, surprising statistics, and reflection-worthy insights, Lauren invites attendees to reexamine the biases and assumptions we hold about disability—and how those beliefs impact disclosure, belonging, and employee wellbeing.

Participants will explore the emotional cost of staying silent, the transformative impact of visibility, and the role that empathy plays in shifting workplace culture. This session will help you better support people’s experiences that you don’t always see—and build a more disability-confident workforce from the inside out.

Session Learning Outcomes:
Understand why many employees with disabilities choose not to disclose—and what it costs them. Identify unspoken biases and beliefs that unintentionally create exclusion for people with invisible disabilities. Reflect on the personal and professional impact of disclosure—and why empathy, not assumptions, must lead the way.

You’ve got the policies. The training. The legal and compliance teams. But have you built a culture of trust? Take it from a lawyer who spent years in corporate compliance: trust is the real foundation of accessibility. Templates are tidy, but humans aren’t. When red tape obscures supports, the very people we’re trying to include get left behind. Sarah knows this all too well, having lived and worked with ADHD for a lifetime. Accessibility is a balancing act. There are benefits to consistency and fairness, but strict rules lack flexibility. Sarah will prove that adding some FLAIR to our compliance programs is the best way to manage risk. We can’t ditch compliance. So let’s go beyond the bare minimum to create a truly accessible workplace.

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Event Details
Sponsors

Calling for Nominations!

We are looking to shine a huge light on the top HR leaders who lead HR at Canadian tech SMBs. What’s an SMB? An SMB employs fewer than 500 employees. The only other condition is that your nomination leads the HR function. If you have any questions please email us at info@goscalehr.com. We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to fill out this short questionnaire.