OTTAWA — The 2010 Paralympic Games kicked-off Friday night with a two-hour opening ceremony, but unless you get CTV’s Vancouver feed, you couldn’t watch it live.

The ceremonies will instead be broadcast Saturday afternoon before Canada’s first sledge hockey game, “in order to reach the largest possible audience,” CTV’s Andrea Goldstein wrote in an e-mail.

Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the NDP’s critic for people with disabilities, said the opening ceremonies should have been broadcast live across the nation as a “symbolic” show of support for Canadians with disabilities.

Especially, she said, since the government just ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Thursday.

“We fought so hard to have the government sign and ratify the UN convention before the start of the Paralympic Games,” she said. “We’re grateful they managed to find a way to do it, but only to have that moment of great excitement diminished by the fact that all of Canada can’t even see the opening ceremonies on television as they happen in real time.”

Laurie Beachell, the national co-ordinator for the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, said his organization has already contacted the Canadian Human Rights Commission about CTV’s coverage of the Olympics, which included live web streaming that wasn’t captioned for people with vision impairments.

He called CTV’s decision not to air the opening ceremonies of the Paralympics live a “loss.

“If we don’t have the opening ceremonies — the kick-off to this event — broadcast live nationally, I think there’s a loss of a significant opportunity here to make the Canadian public aware of how skilled disabled athletes are.”

CTV and Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium are planning to air 57 hours of the Paralympics, which wrap up March 21.

Britain’s BBC, by comparison, plans to air one hour of Paralympic coverage on March 22.