Legal Options
Immigration Legal Clinic Planned for Lakehead Law School
Alegal clinic that plans to operate out of Lakehead University’s Bora Laskin Faculty of Law would specialize in immigration law—an area of practice that is needed in Thunder Bay, according to one of its directors.
Jennifer Dagsvik is working to establish the clinic, after the project was awarded a grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario under its access to justice funding. A lawyer with Matthews Dagsvik Law in Thunder Bay with experience working in immigration law, Dagsvik also teaches immigration law at the law school and, according to the firm’s website, is a founding member of a local refugee sponsorship organization.
“What it will do is fill a gap that we noticed emerging over the last few years in legal services for newcomers,” she says, referring to immigrants, refugees, people claiming refugee status, people here with temporary status, such as students, and people with no status. “Myself and the multicultural association, we started to notice that there were people who needed the assistance of a lawyer in an immigration matter. But here in Thunder Bay we don’t have a legal clinic where they could go and get some free guidance.” The clinic may also provide advice in areas like business law.
“That’s something that you would see in a bigger city, but it’s not something that we had access to,” she continues, adding that, while these types of services may be available in places like Toronto or Ottawa, they often can’t help people who aren’t living in their service area. “We thought it was important to get that service up here.”
Should the clinic get its final approvals (Dagsvik hopes to begin accepting clients in September), she says to start, she will be the only lawyer working there, with the bulk of the work being done by immigration law students, whom she will supervise. “Their coursework will be to meet with people, provide advice, help them with applications, do public legal education, and that sort of work,” she says.
According to Dagsvik, the demand for this type of legal counsel rose in this region in the wake of Canada accepting refugees after the Syrian refugee crisis and other situations where Canada took in displaced peoples. Thunder Bay wasn’t typically a destination under national resettlement initiatives, she adds, but that has changed with the Thunder Bay Multicultural Association becoming a refugee assistance program resettlement site, and the prevalence of other private sponsorship initiatives.
“In a nutshell, family reunification of resettled refugees is a hugely important part of their resettlement in Canada and of their integration into our community and into successfully reestablishing and restarting their life,” she says, adding that, when families are separated during these processes, the member or members who come here have one year to apply to bring other family members over. “For some people, they’re able to do that application on their own, and others need some extra help,” Dagsvik says. “So I think that’s going to be a large portion of the people that we help: the refugee population that is hoping to reunite with family members who are still overseas.” Temporary workers and international students are other groups that the clinic could help, she says, adding that it can also act as a resource to answer questions.
“We’re looking for people who are facing barriers to accessing legal services, and […] trying to remedy those barriers.”