Wheelchairs welcome?
No room for wheelchair-bound speaker

by Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Apr 08/98) - Personal injury lawyer Jerry Blake thought everything would roll smoothly when he arrived at the Explorer Hotel in his wheelchair for a conference on disabled citizens in the workplace.

Conference co-ordinator Rae Celotti had booked him into what has become the city's only wheelchair-accessible room three weeks before. She had confirmed it three days before.

"They guaranteed it would be available," Celotti said.

Fire destroyed the city's only other wheelchair-accessible room, at the Yellowknife Inn, last month.

For wheelchair-bound guests, the rooms are essential because they have wide bathroom doors, raised toilets and grab bars for ease of access.

"I was told the room was taken," the bearded Victoria lawyer said at a conference on the disabled persons' work strategy.

He asked what the hotel would do about the situation and the clerk would only offer a non-wheelchair-accessible room, Blake said.

"Then she started to help other people ahead of me," Blake said. "I had to tell her that I wasn't going away."

When Blake asked to speak to the manager, he said the desk clerk told him the manager was not around.

Three hours later, while in a room where he could not fit his chair through the bathroom door, Blake received an apologetic call from one of the managers.

Since it was 11:30 p.m., it was too late to ask the people in the room whether they would mind moving. Late Monday, it appeared as though Blake could have the room for the next two nights as planned.

No one from the Explorer Hotel would offer an explanation.

"I'm not prepared to comment on this story. I don't believe this is a story. I'm not prepared to comment at all," said Explorer Hotel general manager Jonathan Cross.

Blake said he has no plans to sue the hotel, though he specializes in personal injury litigation.

"You can sue for pain and suffering. And if I were unable to perform well at the conference I could sue for that too," said the keynote speaker at the conference focusing on how to promote disabled persons actively contributing to the workforce.

"Work is so great because it gives people a reason for being," he said.

Blake has been in a wheelchair since a downhill skiing accident when he was 29 years old, in 1983.

"When I got hurt I took a look at myself at the time and asked, 'what is the kind of work I can do given my physical limitations?'"

He pursued law because he thought it would give him flexibility. He can usually work at home if his legs are giving him trouble.

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