DISABILITIES WARRIOR
Tribute to Gladys Whincup
In 2015, when the federal Conservatives tried to shut down a Library and Archives Canada program employing developmentally disabled adults to shred paper, Gladys Whincup fought back. And won.
Four years later when the Liberals tried to do the same, Whincup fought back again. And won.
“I know that work shouldn't be our lives, but for her, it certainly was,” said Elizabeth Stroh of the Ottawa-Carleton Association for Persons with Developmental Disabilities.
Whincup died March 31 from complications after a fall in her bedroom the week before. She was 69.
Whincup was born in Ottawa, but suffered a serious brain injury as a child. She joined OCAPDD in 1973. She lived all her life in the house where she grew up, with her mother, Jesse; her sister, Valerie; and her dog, Angel. She adored them all, Stroh said.
Whincup had worked for the Library and Archives Program and its successors for nearly 40 years, joining in 1981, the year after it began.
“Gladys fought each time our program was on the verge of shutdown,” Stroh wrote in a tribute for Whincup's friends and colleagues at OCAPDD. “She wanted to arrange protests at Parliament Hill and contact ministers and government officials and newspapers and television reporters. She told them all in no uncertain terms that it wasn't fair to shut down their program, that they worked harder than anyone else would.”
Whincup and as many as 50 others with developmental disabilities worked under contract to collect and shred paper for the government in a workspace at Tunney's Pasture. She was ecstatic in 2015 when the workers garnered so much public support that Stephen Harper's Conservatives backed down on plans to eliminate it.
“We got the work back,” she told the Citizen at the time. “We're busy and not just sitting around doing nothing. It feels great.”
In 2019, when the program was again in peril, this time under Justin Trudeau's Liberals, Whincup was again in the vanguard of the fight. The government relented and the workers remain employed under a new program called PODD — People Offering Dumpster Diversion — that steams waste for salvage or resale, and strips the rest down into recyclable components. The workers, who once toiled for a stipend that amounted to about $1.15 an hour, now earn the $14.25 an hour, the provincial minimum wage.
At PODD, Whincup began by pulling staples out of surplus cubicle walls.
“She saw people using drills and said, `I'd like to learn how to do that,'” Stroh said. “And she did — at age 69.”
COVID-19 forced the PODD program to temporarily suspend operations on March 18. It has also prevented the tight-knit group of workers from gathering to mourn.
“We're having a meeting tomorrow and I'll be able to let them all know,” Stroh said. “It's going to be a hard one. Her friends will miss her.”