As the Law Society recently reported, legal aid in New Zealand is ‘on life support’. Urgent action is required to avoid the justice gap becoming a chasm.
Decriminalization of simple drug possession would treat drug use as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue.
(Shutterstock)
Seventy years after it was first launched, legal aid’s principles of equality are a shadow of what they once were.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford returns to his office at the Ontario legislature after announcing the cancellation of retroactive cuts that have hit public health, child care and other municipal services.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
A year ago, Doug Ford’s election was seen as a harbinger of a populist realignment in Ontario and Canadian politics. Now polls suggest Ford has abysmally low personal approval ratings.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford laughs as Finance Minister Vic Fedeli presents the 2019 budget at the legislature in Toronto in April 2019.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
There’s an apparent emerging Doug Ford doctrine in Ontario of short-term gain for long-term pain. It threatens to embed long-term structural costs for the province and its taxpayers.
In a political dispute with Ottawa, Doug Ford’s Ontario government has stopped funding legal aid for refugee claimants. This 2017 photo shows a young asylum seeker being held by an RCMP officer and her father after crossing the border into Canada from the United States.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
The recent decision by the Ontario government to drastically cut funds for legal aid will cause hardship for many low-income residents of Ontario and for refugees claimants.
Income shouldn’t restrict access to justice.
Shutterstock
Inconsistencies in how judges handle appeal cases and different levels of legal provision around the country can leave asylum seekers facing a lottery.
A woman at Yarl’s Wood detention centre in 2015.
via shutterstock.com
Many who represent themselves in court fail to make it through the process, have their case dismissed or lose what otherwise would have been a winning case.
It is bitterly ironic that in this, the 800th anniversary year of Magna Carta, there are threats from the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. This convention is Europe’s own Magna…