David Onley was a popular news reporter and anchor on CITY-TV before he was appointed to the viceregal position, and he also served as a role model and advocate for others
David Onley, who died in Toronto on Jan. 14 at 72, was the lieutenant-governor of Ontario for seven years and was the first person with a disability to hold the job. When he was appointed in 2007, he promised to help other disabled people in the province and started with improving the accessibility of Ontario’s Legislative Building itself. The steps to the building couldn’t accommodate his motorized scooter so a special ramp was installed before he was sworn in.
“We had a pretty strong sense that something was up, and it was probably going to be prorogation,” Mr. Onley later recalled. “Discussions began at that very point and actually continued on the following morning well before meeting with the Premier. He then acted out his part, and I acted out mine.” “Even as I met with the constitutional advisers in the days and weeks ahead of that, we were very, very aware that we were potentially going into very unusual territory,” he said.
He contracted polio in 1953, when he was three years old. He was one of 8,878 people to suffer from the disease in Canada that year, the largest number the country had ever seen. The Salk polio vaccine inoculation program was introduced two years later, dramatically reducing the number of new cases.Courtesy of CITY-TV
“David had a larger-than-life personality. He was very engaging and such an amicable person that people were willing to help and push his wheelchair around a bit, and he had quite a group of friends. Instead of being marginalized, I think he engaged with people, and they engaged back,” Mrs. Onley said.“She was a pit bull. A gentle pit bull, but as the mother of a disabled person she advocated for things for him at school, and one of them was an elevator.
“I met and hired David Onley for an important, on-camera job at CITY-TV and never mentioned his disability. It was the right thing to do and the smart thing to do,” Mr. Znaimer said in a statement. Even when he was reporting in the field, the camera would take a wide shot to show Mr. Onley’s motorized scooter.
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