The Legal Clinic system in Ontario needs adjustment

[maryj...@gmail.com]

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

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.

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