THUNDER BAY – Organizers of a legal-aid town hall remain hopeful the Conservative government will listen and reverse drastic funding cuts to Ontario’s legal-aid system.
The province, in its April budget, announced it was cutting $300 million from the Ministry of the Attorney General’s budget, $133 million of which was slashed from the legal-aid budget, a drop of 35 per cent.
That number is expected to grow to 45 per cent by 2021.
Angie Lynch, speaker school and peer support organizer at the Kinna-aweya Legal Clinic, said the move will drop far too many low-income people between the cracks and potentially cut off their access to legal representation.
Legal clinics, like hers, face a 16 per cent cut to their budgets.
“If our front-line services are impacted, then the citizens of Thunder Bay and the surrounding area ... will definitely be impacted. There won’t be enough service to go around,” Lynch said.
From April 2017 to March 2018, the Kinna-aweya Legal Clinic took on more than 2,600 cases, most of which dealt with eviction prevention and access to income benefits. They helped clients secure proper identification and stopped 91 per cent of the eviction notices their clients were facing.
It’s an attack on poverty, said Sally Colquhoun, the clinic’s co-ordinator of legal services, said it essentially amounts to an attack on poverty by the Doug Ford-led Conservative government.
It’s Ontario’s most vulnerable who will suffer from these legal-aid cuts, she added.
“There seems to be a focus in the cost savings at the Ministry of the Attorney General on programs providing services for low-income people. The overall budget for the Ministry of the Attorney General is somewhere in the billions. They were asked to find savings of$300 million out of that overall budget,” Colquhoun said.
“And $136 million, almost half of that savings, came just from Legal Aid Ontario.”
The Finlandia Club town hall, which included panelists from the Thunder Bay Public Library, the Nor’West Community Health Centre and a poverty activist booted off the recently cancelled basic income project, was designed to increase public discussion about the importance of Legal Aid services, which she said has deep roots within the community.
“It’s going to be costly to the community if those cuts go ahead,” she said. “Research from the Canadian Bar Association indicated that every dollar that’s taken from Legal Aid services results in an increase of about $6 in other government funded costs.”
Colquhoun said she’s always hopeful, which is why she’s holding out hope Premier Doug Ford and Attorney General Caroline Mulroney will listen.
“We still don’t know yet from Legal Aid Ontario exactly how the budget cut is going to impact our clinic, because they’re trying to do it in a way that isn’t going to impact client services on front-line services. But really, it’s probably impossible to do that in legal clinics without impacting front-line services,” Colquhoun said.
“That’s what the government promised, that people weren’t going to lose their jobs.”
About 50 people attended Monday's session.
