Mock Funeral - Roxanne's Speech

This is just another reason why I love this community. So much creativity, passion and perseverance. Thank you for inviting me to speak at this mock funeral today.

Artspace is an amazing diverse community where we all live, work and play – together. Our oldest member here at Artspace is 90 years old and our youngest is 3 months old. We are all ages, colors, sexes, races and religions.

What is most incredible to me is that we are all able here at Artspace. Because of our on-site home care services called SAIL, we (people with disabilities) enjoy freedom and access to participate in our community like everyone else does.

The care we receive here allows us to be more active, productive and successful members of society and we are grateful. It is still very hard to live with a physical disability in our northern city and SAIL is the big equalizer for us.

For many of us, it is not that we are unable do to some of the tasks we ask our caregivers to do. It’s often a matter of energy conservation and efficiency. What might take me 45 minutes to do and drain my energy would take a more able person 2 minutes with no effect on how much they do that day.

We are grateful to the Alberta Government for seeing the value and uniqueness of SAIL and allowing us to continue operating after big, for profit companies were given most home care contracts in Alberta last summer.

But we are not out of the woods yet, we continue to negotiate with Alberta Health Services and as you all know we have a labour dispute outside our homes right now.

There two points I would like to make here today:

Our interactions and negotiations with Alberta Health Services have been respectful, open, and productive. They understand and appreciate our unique model of care here and are committed to preserving it. They also appreciate that we mostly a volunteer run organization and that we’re doing our best to make some needed changes in order to keep our contract with them.

Our interactions and negotiations with Alberta Union of Provincial Employees have been insincere, disrespectful and quite frankly outrageous. They have not tried to understand our model of care or appreciate our active, productive community. What information we have shared with them has been used to intimidate us rather that used to work with us.

We are open and willing to work with professional, respectful people and will continue to pursue those opportunities.

Thank you to everyone for your love and support.