Betty and Jane

Plunger Patrol

Niagara-on-the-Lake Community Centre

14 Anderson Lane

The NOTL Community Centre is one of our favourite bathroom venues. It has it all. It's completely accessible, is a great match for the Sweets and Swirls Cafe, has no capacity problems and can handle large numbers. The bathrooms are family-friendly and on an extremely busy day when we visited, they were clean. Spotless, really.

Niagara-On-The-Lake has some of the best-designed accessible bathrooms. However, many of these award-winning bathrooms’ commitment to accessibility stops at the design level.

We can’t tell you how many wineries and restaurants meet all the design requirements of accessibility only to have someone decide a table or chair should be placed in the space needed to make it accessible. Or that a ramp is a good place to store chairs or that the accessible bathroom is in fact locked and used as staff locker space.

It has been one of the great disappointments in our endeavours. We understand that in heritage buildings there is an argument to preserve and not change features that might compromise the integrity of the original architecture. However, when one of these buildings seeks permits to do a $100,000 renovation, is it not reasonable to insist a percentage goes toward accessibility?

New wineries pop up with kitchens and an abundance of tasting rooms and but sometimes their bathrooms are far from, and in a few cases there is not even an expectation to make the building accessible.

The community centre bathrooms make us proud, not only with how they were built but with how they are managed.

Kudos to Dan Makesenuk for not only providing top-of-the-line Golden Plunge-calibre bathroom faciliities for everyone, but for also making sure his staff were acknowledged for the effort. So, thanks to Craig Currie for making our community centre's washrooms an award-winning experience and earning a 4/5 Golden Plunger rating.