The Quiet Backbone of a Loud Idea: An Introduction to Hubert van Niekerk and Every Canadian Counts

How a year-long teacher exchange to Australia in 2010, three years before that country’s National Disability Insurance Scheme launched, quietly shaped the policy work he now leads in Canada.

This introduction arrived through a familiar door. Cam Wells, longtime host of Handi-Link on CJAM 99.1 FM, nationally syndicated voice in Canadian disability media, and valued member of the PWD Media Distribution Co-op, reached out first. Not long after, Hubert van Niekerk, Executive Director of Every Canadian Counts, followed through the same door at Cam’s encouragement. When two thoughtful people in the disability community independently point at the same person and say, “you should know him,” I pay attention.

So here is Hubert.

Meet the Man Behind the Coalition

Hubert is not a politician. He is, by trade and by temperament, a teacher, seventeen years in self-contained classrooms in Ontario, working with students whose intellectual and multiple disabilities placed them in the kinds of educational settings most Canadians have never seen. Eighteen years with the Ontario Association for Developmental Education, including its presidency. A standing seat on the L’Arche London board. A past presidency of the Council for Exceptional Children, London-Middlesex chapter. Decades of unglamorous, uncompensated, ground-level work in service of people the broader culture has too often consigned to the margins.

And, in 2010, a year-long teacher exchange to Australia.

That last detail is the one to hold onto. Three years after Hubert returned to Canada, Australia launched its National Disability Insurance Scheme, a national, publicly funded, insurance-model framework delivering lifelong disability supports to its citizens, regardless of geography or income threshold. Hubert had been on the ground in the lead-up. He saw what the country was preparing to build before it built it. That observation is the quiet backbone of the policy work he now leads in Canada.

In 2024, Hubert succeeded founder Dr. William Cowie as Executive Director of Every Canadian Counts. Cowie, an LSE-trained economist who spent more than a decade building ECC’s foundational policy framework, has stepped into what Hubert recently described as ECC’s “Man on the Hill in Ottawa” role. The torch passed. The mission has not.

What Every Canadian Counts Is, in Plain English

In Hubert’s own words: “A practical, Canada-wide solution to lifelong disability support designed to replace fragmented programs with a single, publicly funded insurance model that delivers dignity, stability, and real opportunity from birth to end of life.”

Translation: Canada’s current disability-support system is a patchwork. Provincial programs vary enormously, federal supports like the Canada Disability Benefit are recent and modest, and people with lifelong disabilities, and the families that support them, are too often left navigating inconsistencies, gaps, and outright cliffs that punish anyone who dares to move provinces. ECC’s argument is that the patchwork itself is the problem. That the answer is not patches stitched on top of patches, but a coordinated, insurance-model national framework, what they call a Canadian National Disability Insurance Plan, or NDIP, that travels with the person rather than with the province.

ECC is an all-volunteer coalition. No paid employees. The coalition is currently examining whether to pursue formal Canadian charitable-nonprofit status. ECC accepts no government funding by deliberate design. “Preferably not with government,” Hubert told me on our first call. “If we can manage it without the government, that would be even better. Don’t be beholden.” In an environment where political winds shift the funding ground under any advocacy organization that gets too close to a sitting administration, that posture is worth noting.

A volunteer-run coalition operating without government funding does not prove that NDIP is the right answer for Canada. It does not prove that Australia’s NDIS, which now serves more than 760,000 participants, but has weathered cost overruns, fraud investigations, and a decade of structural reform, is the right model to mirror. It does not prove that Canadian federal-provincial politics would tolerate the structural cooperation any such scheme would require. But it does tell you something important: serious people, with decades of lived sector experience, have committed serious time to articulating a specific alternative, and they have done so without the corruption of incentives that comes with paid advocacy. That does not settle the policy debate. It earns the right to be in it.

On the Ground, Two Days Before We Met

Two days before our introductory call, Hubert was MC-ing an Ontario Association for Developmental Education conference. ECC had a booth there, staffed by two of three university-student volunteers Hubert has been mentoring through the coalition. He nearly missed our scheduled call because he had been working in his yard and had to be dragged inside by the ten-minute reminder on his phone.

That detail tells you more about ECC than any policy document can. A retired educator, decades into a career he could have walked away from years ago, MC-ing a niche conference for special-education professionals, while the next generation of advocates, university students choosing to volunteer their unpaid hours, stand at the table making the case to anyone willing to listen. No press release will tell you that story. Coverage of the moment is on Every Canadian Counts’ Facebook page: https://facebook.com/share/p/1KtMdXrEjK/.

If you want a measure of an advocacy organization, this is the measure. Not the press kit. The yard work, the booth, the kids.

The Next Stop: Ottawa, June 1-5

The forward news beat that justifies running this introduction now: Every Canadian Counts has been seated on the planning committee for the Global Leadership Exchange (GLE) Canadian event, held in Ottawa from June 1 through June 5, 2026. ECC will be presenting their work toward a Canadian National Disability Insurance Plan to a global audience of disability-policy leaders, researchers, and advocates.

For AIN readers in Canada and abroad who want to engage directly with the substance, not the executive summary, this is the moment to put on the calendar. The conversation is happening at the level of people doing the actual work, in the city where any future Canadian disability-policy reform would have to be argued, won, and implemented.

Event details: https://gle.world/gle-canadian-leadership-exchange-2026-1st-june-5th-june-2026/

From My Vantage Point as a Publisher

From my vantage point as Publisher of Access Information News and PR Director of AT-Newswire, our beat is access information, news, ideas, and people that directly affect the lives of the blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, neurodivergent, and broader PWD communities we serve. ECC’s specific NDIP proposal is one voice in a complex Canadian disability-policy conversation that includes Disability Without Poverty, Inclusion Canada, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, BCANDS, DAWN Canada, and many other organizations with their own, and sometimes opposing, views on how Canada should close its disability-supports gap.

I take no editorial position here on whether Canada should adopt the NDIP, on the architecture any future scheme should take, or on the specific tradeoffs Australia’s NDIS has revealed in its first decade. Those are policy debates for parliamentarians, advocates, and Canadians themselves.

What I can tell you is this. Hubert van Niekerk is the kind of advocate who is easy to overlook and difficult to dismiss. He does not seek attention. He does not pose. He does the unglamorous work of showing up, at OADE conferences, at parliamentary briefings, at the kitchen tables of L’Arche communities, at the booths of small disability events where the next-generation volunteers he mentors are learning how to make the case. He turned a 401-corridor coffee meeting with longtime accessibility advocate Donna Jodhan into a calendar appointment within twenty-four hours of being introduced to her, because that is how serious people behave when they recognize each other’s seriousness.

That is the kind of advocacy that, over time, builds movements. And it is the kind of voice AIN readers should know exists, regardless of where they themselves land on the underlying policy.

Connect with Every Canadian Counts

Website: https://everycanadiancounts.com
General inquiries: info@everycanadiancounts.com 📧️
Executive Director Hubert van Niekerk: hvanniekerk@everycanadiancounts.com 📧️
Facebook: https://facebook.com/everycanadiancounts
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/every-canadian-counts-advocacy/
X: https://x.com/EveryCdnCounts
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/everycdncounts.bsky.social
Instagram: https://instagram.com/every_canadian_counts

” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “

Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher and Journalist, President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today

Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.