“I often say to people that I live in hope. And the difference between hope and optimism is that optimism means you’re sitting around thinking things are going to get better. But hope requires action.”
Soon after Krista Carr graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a Bachelor of Business Administration, she found herself heading up a creaky set of stairs in an old apartment in one of Fredericton’s historic buildings to be interviewed for a job she knew nothing about. It was 1995 and Carr, then 23, had received a voicemail message from someone with the New Brunswick Association for Community Living asking if she could come in for an interview at 9 a.m. the next morning.
Carr was stumped. She was certain she hadn’t applied for a job with an organization that advocated for people with intellectual disabilities and was completely unfamiliar to her. But she needed a job, even if by all appearances this wasn’t where she expected her business degree would land her.
“I was going to have a fancy career in marketing and communications in a really nice place and was very focused on that corporate pathway,” she says from her office in Fredericton, describing how after the interview — which came after a local politician referred the group to Carr — she was offered a fulltime job as an executive assistant, a position that paid about $9 an hour and for which she was clearly overqualified.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I will not be staying here. This is not going to be my life, right? This will be a very short stay until I find something better.’ But it wasn’t long before I thought, ‘I might never leave here.’”
In fact, the experience set Carr on a transformational path that she hasn’t strayed from for 31 years, starting with her introduction to people in her community who had intellectual disabilities. She quickly realized that they were no different than her, that they wanted the same things when it came to getting an education, having a family, finding a job and having full, meaningful lives.
She soon learned, however, just how hard it was for people with disabilities to access even the most basic of services, something she had little awareness of at the time.
“Everything was a fight and everything was a struggle for them,” she says. “I remember being so impacted by the depth of the unfairness of it all. It was unjust, but it was an injustice that I was newly being exposed to. And I just felt like, I have to do something to make a difference here.”
Carr immersed herself in her job at the association, taking on more tasks and responsibilities handed to her by the Executive Director who became her mentor, Lorraine Silliphant. When she got cancer, she told Carr she wanted her to take over as executive director at age 27, only five years after she started with the organization. She got over her “imposter syndrome” and took the job, growing the New Brunswick Association for Community Living from an office of two people to one with more than 85.
Under her watch, the organization, which was renamed Inclusion New Brunswick, helped more people with intellectual disabilities be able to live in their own homes, be part of inclusive education and recreation, find inclusive childcare, secure real jobs with good pay and access employment supports that took them out of segregated work environments doing menial tasks and making pennies a day.
Carr was instrumental in helping senior parents of children with an intellectual disability develop plans for when they can no longer support them at home, while also working to transform the disability support system to make it more tailored to an individual’s goals and life in community.
Carr wanted to open the door for people with intellectual disabilities to post-secondary education which they were shut out of. She worked with community colleges to launch pilot projects at three of them. In a matter of years, the program allowing people with intellectual disabilities into regular programs was operating in every community college in New Brunswick. Their employment rate upon graduation? Ninety-three per cent, Carr says with enthusiasm, adding it “was better than the ‘regular’ kids!”
“All of a sudden there was a post-secondary pathway for kids with intellectual disabilities that was never there before. It was big progress, but there was still so much more to do,” making clear the achievements involved the contributions of people with an intellectual disability, their families, hard working civil servants, politicians, volunteers and staff.
Still, her accomplishments at the provincial level attracted the attention of the national organization, Inclusion Canada, a national federation of 300 local and 13 provincial and territorial associations working on behalf of roughly one million Canadians with a developmental disability. The group recruited and hired her as its executive vice-president in 2017, granting her only request that she be able to stay in Burton, the area outside Fredericton where she was born and raised.
In her new role, Carr remains focused on the same inclusion goals but has shifted to issues that fall under federal jurisdiction. That includes initiatives related to exclusion, marginalization and the staggering rate of poverty among people with intellectual disabilities, now estimated to be around 70 per cent nationally.
Inclusion Canada took it on and, working with other disability organizations across the country and a very determined federal Minister of Disability, ended up making the Canada Disability Benefit Act law in 2023, creating a federal income supplement for people with disabilities.
“A federal benefit, for working age Canadians with disabilities, to help alleviate poverty is a huge accomplishment and we’ve got nowhere to go but up,” she says of the $200 a month supplement acknowledging that it is nowhere near adequate to alleviate the deep poverty faced by thousands of Canadians with disabilities but it’s a start.
“Unfortunately, in the disability space we always have to be happy with progressive incrementalism: we’re trying to push rope uphill all the time because society has very ablest biases, even though good people are not trying to have them.”
For her efforts, Carr has received the King Charles III Coronation Medal, the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Bruce Uditsky Leadership Award from Inclusion Alberta, accolades she mentions with humility.
“I consider myself someone who cares deeply and just gets up every morning to work as hard as I can to move the needle for people who desperately need the world to change for them. Helping to make society a welcoming and inclusive one that supports each person to reach their fullest potential is the kind of society I want to live in and I want my children to grow up in.”
PPF’s Frank McKenna Awards 2026 celebrate leaders whose ingenuity and initiative are helping to drive change in Atlantic Canada. This year’s event will take place on Oct. 29 in Moncton. Register now.
« Des tables plus grandes, des récits plus riches, un impact plus large. »
Inez Jabalpurwala, Présidente-directrice générale du Forum des politiques publiques
Notre travail rassemble des dirigeants accomplis et de nouvelles voix qui produisent des idées pratiques et robustes pour des politiques au service de tous les Canadiens.
