South Etobicoke Community Legal Services

SOUTH ETOBICOKE COMMUNITY LEGAL SERVICES

Staff Report – 2005

Kenn Hale, Lawyer-Director

Another year is coming to a close and everyone associated with our clinic is looking forward to the celebration of 20 years of service in 2006. This will give us a chance to look at the changes that have happened in the last 20 years and the role our clinic has played in those changes. Since our last Annual Meeting, we have had a very significant change in our staff. But the changes to the laws and policies affecting our clients that we hoped for in 2004 have still not materialized and our clients are still suffering from badly-broken systems of tenant protection and income support.

Staff Changes

For the first time in over six years, we have had a change in our staff. In May, Audrey Campbell, who had been our staff lawyer since 1998, resigned her position. Audrey had been representing poor people in their struggles for over twenty years – at legal clinics in downtown Toronto, in Mississauga as well as South Etobicoke and in private practice. She has left a significant mark on important areas of clinic law - most notably workers’ compensation, immigration and the rights of public housing tenants. While Audrey is taking some time off to pursue her interests in gardening, literature and raising two young dogs, we expect to see her back in some new role in the not-too-distant future. She is a first-rate advocate and has been an excellent teacher and mentor for many lawyers and legal workers during her career. We miss her depth of knowledge and experience and wish her the best in whatever she chooses to do.

Fortunately for the staff and the community, we were able to find someone to fill the staff lawyer position who shares Audrey’s commitment to clinic law practice and in-depth knowledge about immigration and public housing issues. He is Julius Mlynarski, and although he does not have as much experience as Audrey has, he has served the community in clinics and in private practice for many years. He also brings additional expertise to the clinic in social assistance and tenants’ rights – the areas where we have the greatest demand for service. He has now passed his probation period and is a welcome addition to our staff who does not hesitate to take on difficult cases and a heavy workload.

I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Ryan Peck, a young lawyer who we “borrowed” from the Tenant Duty Counsel Program during the interviewing and transition process between Audrey and Julius in February and March. His enthusiasm, creativity and hard work kept us going during an uncertain period.

Income Support

Although they are running huge budget surpluses, the Government of Canada continues to fail to provide adequate income support to people who are unemployed or disabled. This leaves the Province of Ontario and theCity of Toronto with this responsibility. But they claim that they can’t afford to take care of the people who need help. We have tried to address this in many ways. We have organized local and regional meetings about the “Ontario Needs a Raise” campaign, collected petitions and co-ordinated (with LAMP Community Health Centre) an Etobicoke delegation to the “Walk, Wheel and Ride for Dignity” march on September 28. This campaign continues the fight for improving the life of people receiving financial help from Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program by demanding an increase in the rates and ending the “claw-back” of the “baby bonus”, along with an increase to the minimum wage.

We convened a meeting about these issues with Donna Cansfield, the Etobicoke Centre Member of Provincial Parliament who is now the Minister of Energy. She promised to help us in making the system more humane and fair and we hope that now she is in the Cabinet, she can have more influence on these matters. We intend to continue pressuring her and Laurel Broten (Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP and Minster of the Environment who did not have time to meet with us) until we accomplish some real changes to make our clients’ lives a bit easier.

We also try to help people meet their basic needs by doing income support casework. Most of our cases continue to be about access to disability benefits and we are usually successful in appealing the government’s refusal to recognize their disabilities. However, many of our clients who finally manage to get their disabilities recognized encounter new problems which block them getting benefits. As well, the Ministry of Community and Social Services has undertaken a full review of all existing files of people with disabilities. This has resulted in an increase of cases about other ODSP issues such as “spouse in the house”, “excess” assets and “overpayments”. To make matters worse, even when there is a hearing on an appeal our clients and our staff have suffered from the erratic scheduling policies of the Social Benefits Tribunal. These problems are only expected to get worse as the new Chair of this Tribunal (he moved over from running the Rent Tribunal!) has decided to implement a system of “block scheduling” of hearings, starting in January 2006. This means that our staff and our disabled clients will have to wait around - sometimes for hours – for their cases to be called. Our efforts to get the Courts to overturn the arbitrary decisions of this Tribunal have not worked so far, although our colleagues in other clinics have had repeated successes in the Courts in fighting a narrow definition of disability. But many of our clients who were successful in getting their disabilities acknowledged may find that their benefits are taken away as the Ministry begins its new system of “medical reviews” in the near future.

So, we will continue our joint efforts with other groups, locally and provincially, to work on a public campaign for changes in the ODSP disability determination process and ongoing issues about access to these benefits. Our community legal worker has recently joined the Board of the Income Security Advocacy Centre to ensure that we continue to have a strong voice in how these campaigns are run. Getting the province to make these changes is the only way to ensure that our clients and all disabled people in Ontario get the financial and other support that they need and deserve. We also work with the officials of Toronto Social Services who administer the Ontario Works Program to ensure that decisions about income support and other benefits are fair to everyone. There are particular concerns about Toronto residents who came here as refugees but whose refugee claims have not been accepted or have been withdrawn or abandoned.

Workers’ Rights

Many of our clients – even those who need government support programs to help them meet their basic needs – are in the workforce, either as part-time or full-time workers. These workers are still looking for real protection from wrongful dismissal and dead-beat bosses. The Employment Standards Act is supposed to give them this protection. Although Ontario’s Ministry of Labour has recently initiated an active public education campaign along with some minor improvements in enforcement practices, we are still waiting for stronger measures on enforcement and collection of unpaid wages. This is certainly a most urgent matter for the Provincial Government. According to an official report from the Ministry, violations continued to be found in the majority of workers' claims. Even worse, still the majority of employers that were ordered to pay workers failed to pay! Many of these workers have ended up on social assistance and/or have been evicted from their homes while waiting to be paid what they have earned.

Recent announcements from the Ministry seem to be moving away from enforcement, instead looking back into a “wage protection system”. The Government of Canada is considering legislation along the same lines (Bill C-55) as well as some changes to the bankruptcy laws that would give unpaid wages a higher priority than they now have. We will continue our efforts in raising these issues and demanding a public discussion around their proposed changes. If members of the community were more aware that millions of dollars are owed by irresponsible bosses to workers in this Province, they can help us convince government that it’s time for real change - no more condoning of bad employers by using taxpayers’ money to pay these wages instead of taking strong enforcement action!

Housing

The biggest news here is that there is no news for the millions of people who rent their homes in Ontario. Premier McGuinty’s election promise that within a year he would replace the Tenant Protection Act with a law that actually protected tenants is still unfulfilled - over two years after his election. The consultation process that the government staged last year appears to have had no effect despite the overwhelming support for reform by tenants and other members of the public. The “louder voices” of the landlords have been able to suppress the changes that are long overdue in this unfair law in spite of the fact that tenants who can afford to do so are voting with their feet and moving into ownership housing as fast as they can. Landlords are still able to neglect their basic responsibilities and keep those tenants who cannot afford to move up and so the demand for work on behalf of these tenants still far exceeds the resources we have.

The process of appointments to the Rent Tribunal set up under the Tenant Protection Act (and to other tribunals that decide on our clients’ rights) remains unreformed. This means that unskilled, inexperienced people are filling these important positions based on their friendships with and support for Mr. McGuinty’s party. It becomes part of our job to show them the realities of tenants’ lives and the legal tools by which tenants’ problems can be addressed. The appointment of a new Tribunal Chair – Dr. Lillian Ma – who has a reputation as a defender of human rights, is the first sign since the Tribunal was set up in 1998 that some progress is being made.

Despite the difficulties that we meet every day at the Tribunal, that is where we must go to fight off the unjust eviction notices and the abuse of tenants. We have helped dozens of tenant families keep their homes and win compensation for their possessions that are lost or damaged due to landlord’s neglect or wilful action. Where we are unsuccessful at the Tribunal, we take as many cases as we can to the Divisional Court. Depending on the case and the judge, the reaction there ranges from amazement at what a poor job the Tribunal does to a complete lack of concern for the way that fundamental rights are trampled on. More and more, the Toronto Community Housing Company is relying on eviction as a way of dealing with social problems in spite of an official policy that says that eviction is a last resort. This is a direct result of eliminating any staff positions that had any role in community-building in these projects. Our clinic has worked with other clinics to convince the Housing Company Board that a real eviction prevention policy is in their interest and the public’s interest. But they prefer to accept the advice of their staff in closed-door meetings and we must take this fight to the City Council that appoints this Board. Even the Rent Tribunal can usually see that adding more seniors, disabled people and single-parent families to the ranks of the homeless is not a viable solution to these problems!

We are very disappointed to see that some housing co-operatives in our community are taking a similar approach and squandering their members’ resources on expensive eviction fights with particular members. Co-op housing has the potential to get low-income people out of their dependency on landlords who just want to take advantage of them. But some people forget these ideals when they get elected to a co-op board of directors and become rigid and authoritarian, destroying any kind of community feeling in the process. We have had to spend a great deal of time and energy in the last year dealing with these kinds of situation on behalf of co-op members.

The best hope we have of getting fair treatment for tenants is through tenants organizing and demanding that their legal rights be respected. We have long supported the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations and have worked with them this year in their “Tenant College” program of educating tenants about their rights and how to enforce them. We are very happy to see that a local tenant group – the South Etobicoke Tenants’ Association – is beginning to get organized in the Lakeshore and Alderwood communities. They have held a get-acquainted picnic (indoors, unfortunately), have surveyed dozens of tenants about their concerns and are having their founding meeting next week. We plan to work with them to ensure that large and small landlords begin to respect the law and, more importantly, begin to respect the tenants who are their customers. We also meet with some of the elected tenant representatives of the Toronto Community Housing Company to keep in touch with the issues they are dealing with and to offer our help in educating and informing those tenants. The tenants of the TCHC buildings along the East Mall are particularly in need of support and we hope that we will be able to provide this beyond case-by-case legal representation.

Finally on the housing front, there is the work of getting new affordable housing for our community. We have worked with the Etobicoke Lakeshore Housing Task Force for the past five years in their efforts to pressure all levels of government to address the pressing need for more of such housing. Recent figures show 70,000 families on the waiting list for TCHC units – more than the number of people that live there already! But no new housing is being built, in spite of commitments of untold millions of dollars in the speeches of politicians. Ms Broten convened two meetings of community leaders in which we participated with Task Force members to discuss getting housing built in South Etobicoke. But so far there has been a further study documenting the need and nothing more. We have spoken out at development meetings in favour of requiring condo developers to contribute money to affordable housing, but even when City council agrees with this the Province’s Municipal Board overturns their decisions and allows massive towers to be built with only the tiniest of contributions to community needs. This process is very discouraging as the grand promises and plans of those in power fail to deliver any new housing for those who need it, while expensive private development proceeds at breakneck speed.

Immigration

The fight for fair treatment of refugees and immigrants has always been an important part of the work of South Etobicoke Community Legal Services. We continue to open a small number of files in this area and regularly provide advice and brief services to people seeking advice on immigration matters. Because other legal resources are available in this area and, in other areas of law there is no alternative to our office, immigration continues to be only a minor area of our practice. However, in the hiring of our staff lawyer, we had the opportunity to consider what the future place of immigration law would be in our clinic. In deciding to hire Julius, with his extensive background in immigration and refugee law, we re-affirmed our commitment to providing this service and to keeping up to date on the issues in this area of law. We must ensure that we do not allow other important areas of law to crowd this work out. Refugees and new immigrants are among the most disadvantaged people in our community. We must ensure that our doors are open to them and we are knowledgeable about the issues that affect them most immediately.

Taking Leadership in the Clinic Movement

The operation of a community legal clinic is about more than just giving legal advice and representation to poor people. We are part of an important social movement within Canada and across the world that seeks justice and equity for people regardless of their ability to pay. Having survived as an organization for almost 20 years and with staff that have decades of experience among them, we have a responsibility to provide leadership to our part of this movement. As mentioned above, our community legal worker has joined the Board of the provincial specialty clinic dealing with financial support for poor people – the Income Security Advocacy Centre. I am on the Board of the provincial specialty clinic dealing with tenants’ rights – the Advocacy Centre for Tenants – Ontario. Sharon and I have worked hard in the last year on the Toronto Clinic Training Committee, organizing a successful two-day conference for all the clinic staff in Toronto last month. Lorna headed up the Metro Toronto Support Staff Association for a number of years. Julius is active in the inter-clinic groups working on public housing and immigration and is preparing an education session for clinic staff on dealing with debts arising from immigration sponsorships.