Good afternoon. I am the director of the Clinique juridique francophone de l'Est d'Ottawa, which was the fifth legal aid clinic to open in Ottawa.
Existing services do not always meet our clients' legal aid needs. In Ottawa, we are doing everything we can to coordinate our services so our clients are not left to their own devices. There is currently very good collaboration between the legal aid office and the five community legal clinics.
The clinics also collaborate amongst themselves. They help each other when one clinic is overloaded and direct their clientele to whichever clinic specializes in a given area of the law. I am thinking of the University of Ottawa clinic, which offers services in small claims court with the help of law students who are supervised by a member of the Bar. However, the example I just gave does not necessarily apply everywhere in Ontario.
I would add that even though they try to meet their clients' needs every day, the clinics are often overloaded. Our clinic has been open since September 2003, and for the past year, our caseload had been as heavy as that of other clinics that have been operating in Ottawa for a long time.
Each legal clinic is responsible for a given geographic area. There is a clinic in central Ottawa, one in the south, one in the east and one in the west. Our clinic is in Ottawa east and has a special mandate to serve francophones, a group that is particularly affected by poverty. We regularly receive requests from other clinics to help francophones from all over Ottawa because those clinics are overloaded.
As the first point of contact for people who are not familiar with the workings of the justice system, we have found that there is a great demand for family law services, which are not covered by legal clinics, and only partly covered by legal aid offices.
Even people who are eligible financially often have trouble finding a lawyer because their area of the law is covered neither by the legal aid office or the legal clinics. This means there is a void in some areas of the law. There are also a lot of people who just miss meeting the eligibility criteria and who have a lot of trouble paying lawyers to help them.
I have worked in legal clinics for nearly 20 years, and, in my humble opinion, they are law offices that provide essential services to the most underprivileged people in our communities. This system costs less than paying lawyers in private practice.
I must say that legal clinics are currently at risk because the number of requests is increasing and Ontario's legal aid budgets are running a deficit.
Legal clinics specialize in legal representation in the area of housing law and income maintenance. This area includes many sub-specialities, such as welfare, disability benefits, employment insurance, worker's compensation and the Canada Pension Plan. Some clinics, including ours, also specialize in immigration and assisting victims of crime.
The clinics also have a community development mandate that includes prevention of legal problems through community legal education and legislative reform in areas related to poverty.
Mr. Chair, hon. members of the committee, thank you.