In justifying the 30-per-cent funding cut, Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney and Doug Ford said the agency served about 100,00 fewer clients last year. Lawyers say this assertion is a ‘false claim’
Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney, seen here scrumming with journalists in March, 2019, cited the statistic in an April 12 letter to Legal Aid’s chief executive about the cuts.The union representing lawyers who work for Legal Aid Ontario says the main justification offered by the province for its 30-per-cent funding cut for the agency is wrong – and that the government of Premier Doug Ford has been misleading the public.
They say Legal Aid now serves more clients, pointing to the number of “certificates” issued to lawyers in private practice when they act for a Legal Aid client, which is up 23 per cent since 2013-14. Citing numbers from the 2018 Auditor-General’s report on Legal Aid, the union also says the number of clients served by the agency’s duty counsel is up 2.1 per cent over the same period.
In 2017-18, community legal clinics funded by Legal Aid stopped tracking some of the services they offer, such as advice, referrals or things such as writing a letter to a landlord for a client. Instead, the agency’s overall numbers only track when formal “case representation” is provided for a client. That change saw the official numbers for clinic files appear to drop to 170,429 last year from 226,000 in 2016-17.
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