The Legal Clinic system in Ontario needs adjustment

Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario (ACLCO) Lenny Abramowicz,

Executive Director
(Speech at Southwest regional training – April 11, 2008)

He said
Although clinics will never be able to help every person who is in need, it is unquestioned that we would like to be able to help more than we are helping now. Overall, clinics are not as accessible as we would like to be. And we are particularly not as accessible towards certain groups: those with physical or mental disabilities, those who don’t speak English as their first language, and those who live in rural and remote areas. There are particular challenges involved in providing services to those groups. (Fortunately, the ACLCO and clinics are presently working with the Law Foundation who have initiated a project on accessibility issues.)

We say
This needs to be fixed immediately.
The system could be held for discrimination (Duty to accommodate)

He said
Allow me to make a brief comment about money. It is undeniable that more money would help solve some of these problems. It is also undeniable that, considering the need, there is nowhere near enough money being spent on poverty law services in Ontario. The demand for our services is insatiable and it is depressing and demoralizing to all of us to have to turn away or provide only limited services to so many. It is also undeniable that the government has the resources to meet these needs, but chooses to spend most of it in other places: in other areas of the justice sector, such as high profile prosecutions of alleged terrorists and gang members, or on significant salary increases for crown lawyers, judges and tribunal members.

We say
The clinic system here in Ontario spends thousands of man hours year after year holding and speaking at public events. Putting this information on the Internet once and for all to see would free up lawyers time and have a major impact on helping the people that the system was designed to help in the first place.

He said
We must also find a better way to share the information and knowledge that exists in the clinic system. Our colleague, Kevin Smith at Parkdale often says, "there does not exist a single problem confronting a clinic that some other clinic hasn’t already dealt with". I think he is right. We are pretty good at sharing our substantive legal information, but not as well in other areas such as management and administration. The problem is that too often we are each left to figure out the solution on our own, sometimes reinventing the wheel 80 times over. We must find better ways to share the tremendous wealth of knowledge that exists in our 80 clinics.

We say
The clinic system must have a internet data base for main tribunal decisions that the general public would have access to. They already have this information but keep it to them selves. This would not be expensive to do and would have major saving in wasted Tribunal time.

For more stories go to http://welfarelegal.blogspot.com/

Ron Payne
Welfare Legal
Hamilton, Ontario
E-mail welfarelegal2004@hotmail.com