How Ontario’s new legal aid bill will impact Parkdale
Last June, the province of Ontario implemented its funding cuts to Legal Aid Ontario (LAO), impacting different sectors of the legal community. LAO provides funding to over 73 community legal clinics; one of them being Parkdale Community Legal Services (PCLS). Ontario cut LAO’s budget by $133 million in 2019 and had planned to further cut $31 million in 2020.
However, in December of 2019, there were several announcements proposing changes to LAO, as well as Parkdale. Attorney General Doug Downey announced that the proposed cut to LAO’s budget for 2020 would not be pursued. LAO also made a statement about reconsidering Parkdale’s funding for 2020, and the Ontario government further proposed a new bill called the Smarter and Stronger Justice Act, also known as Bill 161.
Roshni Khemraj, a former placement student at PCLS, provided some clarification regarding both Bill 161 as well as LAO’s funding reconsideration, stating that “while the reconsideration of LAO’s funding was released around the same time as Bill 161, it does not reverse the legal aid cuts for Parkdale.”
PCLS is an organization that was founded in 1971 and provides legal information, advice and representation to vulnerable communities. Once the cuts to LAO were implemented in 2019, PCLS faced a $1 million deficit in funding over the span of two years, half of which has already been cut, which created major setbacks for the clinic.
Erin Sobat, a former PCLS student, described how PCLS implemented a restructuring plan as a result of the cuts, which impacted both its staff and clients. There was a cut in the number of their frontline staff from 22 workers to 14 workers, which in turn resulted in both the staff and students having to take on administrative and legal responsibilities. This led to the reduction of the effectiveness of legal services provided to their clients.
Five months later, it appears that nothing has changed substantially. Whether PCLS will face the remaining cut to their budget remains uncertain. Sobat explained that “LAO could not make cuts in advance, but can only make them after they receive the funding application in January 2020.” As mentioned above, PCLS received a decision from the clinic committee of LAO which reconsidered the clinic’s funding due to the uniqueness of PCLS as a “hybrid of a community, educational and specialty clinic.” While many consider this a positive step forward, Khemraj emphasized that “this decision does not remove the possibility that LAO would give PCLS a smaller budget when they release budgets for 2020-2021 in Spring 2020.”
So, how exactly does the proposed Smarter and Stronger Justice Act relate to LAO, and how does this impact clinics like Parkdale in the foreseeable future? Only Schedules 15 and 16 of Bill 161 have proposed amendments to the Legal Aid Services Act. One of the major changes has been to the mandate of the Legal Aid Services Act itself, which removes the protective safeguards in place through government accountability to provide legal aid services to vulnerable communities and clinics.
Khemraj expanded on the bill by explaining that “there is the explicit removal of the longstanding purpose of legal aid [to] “promote access to justice throughout Ontario for low-income individuals,” as well as the removal of the scope of services for “disadvantaged communities.” Alternatively, the proposed act is now focused on “ensuring value for money” when providing such services.
Speaking in his personal capacity as an Associate Professor at Osgoode, Professor Amar Bhatia stated that “[i]t’s disturbing how the role of communities has been erased from the proposed legislation. Low-income communities served by poverty law clinics and specialized clinics focused on ethno-racial communities do not seem to have a protected place in the new legislation apart from the narrow focus on individualized legal services.” He discussed how this shift in Bill 161 further entrenches the instructions tied to last year’s budget cuts that clinics (including PCLS) focus on individual legal services and public legal education, rather than law reform and community organizing efforts.
“These changes take PCLS and other clinics away from a community lawyering approach that has wider systemic impact on the social determinants of people’s legal problems,” Bhatia said. Another significant part of Bill 161 is the expansion of LAO’s role in determining who, as well as how much funding should be distributed to a given entity or individual. Khemraj explained that “[t]he [b]ill gives LAO the authority under s. 5(6) to cut funding for a service provider, including clinics, without any consideration of the impact [to] that entity to provide legal services.”
Whereas under the existing law, clinics could apply for a reconsideration of funding decisions, the new bill proposes that any existing reconsiderations are to be terminated. Therefore, LAO would not legally be required to fund community legal clinics that conduct advocacy work, or support clinics who value and work in law reform and poverty initiatives. The effect that this will have on clinics who are at the forefront of advocacy work, such as the PCLS, remains to be seen.