Vulnerable families hit by legal aid cuts
Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s education minister, claims to be fully “committed to combating racism and improving equity and opportunity for (Black and racialized) children.”
Yet, his government is seriously hampering that necessary work. Last spring’s devastating cuts to legal aid impacted a wide swath of programming, including efforts to support families challenging school suspensions and expulsions far too often meted out to racialized youth.
The repercussions continue to reverberate.
Legal projects focused solely on helping families push back against severe disciplinary measures were piloted in both Ottawa and Toronto last year. After the provincial cuts to Legal Aid Ontario, only Toronto’s TAIBU Community Health Centre received further funding. Ottawa’s program was not renewed, despite having provided crucial interventions for over 40 families. In fact, suspensions were completely withdrawn in 14 instances and shortened in 32 instances. Two expulsions were completely halted.
Those numbers represent renewed hope for dozens of young people facing a variety of barriers. And the need remains, says Abdirizak Karod, executive director of the Somali Centre for Family Services, which operated the program.
Now, a local community-based organization aims to fill the void through a new partnership with the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law. The plan is to provide an array of legal services to low-income families of all backgrounds, including similar school-related legal help, says William Felepchuk, executive director at Muslim Family Services of Ottawa. While this is good news, it demonstrates how current provincial policies are forcing marginalized communities to fend for themselves.
“Law is what structures fairness in our society. Not having access to legal help can mean people are denied their rights or don’t get fair opportunities and benefits,” University of Ottawa law professor David Wiseman points out. He oversees the establishment of the legal clinic with a team of law students.
Racialized families should have legal recourse considering their children are more likely to experience bias in the education system.
The latest evidence of that is found in a recent interim report on the Peel District School Board. Provincial investigators wrote that they “consistently heard painful accounts of traumatic experiences in schools and school communities that speak to systemic and historical disparities between and across racial, ethnic and cultural groups with respect to access to programming, services, academic achievement, transitions to post-secondary education and the workforce, hiring, and promotion, as well as discipline measures both in education and employment.”
At the Toronto District School Board, Black, Indigenous, Middle Eastern and mixed students were disproportionately represented in the numbers.
Farah Aw-Osman, executive director of Ottawa’s Centre for Resilience & Social Development, laments the loss of necessary legal support for families. Proactively, his centre is running two new federally funded projects that place outreach workers and clinicians in several elementary and secondary schools to bridge cultural divides.
“Attendance is up, parents are engaged in the schools and these programs are empowering the youth to advocate for themselves,” Aw-Osman says.
Cuts to legal aid have meant fewer people are eligible for support altogether, adds Dana Fisher, local vice-president for the Society of United Professionals Legal Aid Ontario Local. Stringent adherence to the rules means anyone making slightly above $22,000 a year is excluded from even simple legal advice, let alone full representation in court. “It’s quite devastating that in order to receive access to justice you have to go to the community because the government is no longer providing these crucial services,” Fisher told me.
She’s right; the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario clearly has it all wrong when it comes to equity and opportunity. It’s costing us dearly.
Amira Elghawaby is an Ottawa-based human rights advocate and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @AmiraElghawaby