Rural Legal Services Faces Pressure to Merge

Jeff Green | Jun 30, 2010

Ukranian visitors and Rural Legal Services staff in Sharbot Lake.

It was an unlikely sight.

A group of earnest Ukrainian lawyers were crowded around a table in the cramped board room of Rural Legal Services (RLS) last Friday afternoon, June 25. Through an interpreter, they asked question after question of Susan Irwin, the executive director of RLS, as well as staff lawyer Bill Florence and Central Frontenac Mayor Janet Gutowski. They listened carefully to the answers being provided by the interpreter, and then broke out in spontaneous conversation with each other in Ukrainian before someone else fired off a question.

The Ukrainian delegation has been touring public legal clinics in Eastern Ontario and they wanted to visit a rural clinic as well, so the visit to Sharbot Lake was organized for them.

They were full of questions about the Canadian legal system, the lifestyle in the local region, and more. They were particularly interested in the fact that the lawyers at the clinic enjoyed a cordial relationship with the municipality.

After a 90-minute session at Rural Legal Services, the legal clinic staff accompanied the Ukrainian delegation over to the Sharbot Lake Family Health Team, where they were addressed by Dr. Peter Bell and nurse-practitioner Brenda Bonner from the Health Team, and Mike Procter and Kevin Raison from Northern Frontenac Community Services.

“We wanted to give them an understanding of one of the advantages of a rural community, to show them how a variety of services, from health to medical to social, can be integrated in order to serve a population that is scattered over a wide area,” said Susan Irwin.

The impact of the afternoon's events was more powerful that anyone at Rural Legal Services could have expected. When the leader of the Ukrainian delegation stood up to thank the people who had been so welcoming to them, she burst into tears.

“It turns out that the relationship between the legal community and politicians is very problematic in the Ukraine,” said Susan Irwin later, “mainly because of corruption, so having Janet Gutowski among us as a colleague was very powerful for her. For us, it is a reminder that while we have our problems, our system is better than many others around the world.”

It is a good time for Susan Irwin to be reminded of this, because Rural Legal Services is faced with changes to its own structure.

Legal Aid Ontario, a provincially funded not-for-profit corporation that is tasked with serving the legal needs of low-income Ontarians, is the funding agency for RLS and 76 other clinics throughout the province. Faced with a budget deficit of their own, as well as the influence of government policy that is pushing for a cut in administrative overhead in favor of demonstrable outcomes for clients, Legal Aid Ontario has been auditing the work done by all of its clinics and recently released a discussion paper on administrative costs.

The paper is coming out on the heels of another major change in legal aid. Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) has replaced 51 area legal aid processing offices with nine district offices in line with an initiative that is aimed at providing more and more service, including filling out legal aid applications, through the internet. This move, which LAO characterizes as a service improvement, is of limited benefit to the rural poor, which as a group has limited internet access or computer skills necessary to fill out complex online forms.

In the next phase of change, LAO will be looking at cutting down rental costs and administrative overhead at general service clinics such as Rural Legal Services in Sharbot Lake.

Even a cursory reading of the discussion paper leads one to wonder if the writing isn't on the wall for Rural Legal Services.

The paper refers to a study from Indiana in 2004 which concludes that “… not for profits with less than $1 million in annual expenditures face infrastructural challenges. Leadership of these organizations may wish to consider alternatives such as growing or merging to a scale where adequate infrastructure is affordable, outsourcing infrastructure services, or perhaps even restructuring to a smaller, more volunteer-centered organization where infrastructure issues tend to be less critical.” While it is noted in the LAO discussion paper that the Indiana study “may not be on point, the observation was interesting.”

Rural Legal Service has already felt the impact of funding cuts. When their senior staff lawyer, Peter Graham, retired in March of 2009, his position was not replaced by LAO, leaving the two remaining lawyers and a single administrative person, Ellamae Richardson, to cover the slack. It hasn’t been easy for them, but as the statistics that accompanied the 2009 annual report attest, RLS was able to keep up their levels of service, including doing 1384 client assists, and producing 23 Legalese columns for the Frontenac News.

Rural Legal Services serves Northern Frontenac and Lennox and Addington counties. It has the task of providing legal information to area residents regardless of income, as well as participating in legal education, law reform, and community development initiatives. For lower income residents, RLS provides legal representation before courts and tribunals and casework in certain areas of the law for residents who qualify for legal aid.

A number of RLS clients are Ontario Disability Support Payment (ODSP) or Ontario Works recipients, and a number are seniors who need help with issues such as estate planning, elder abuse and other matters.

While Rural Legal Services cannot provide services in all areas of the law or to all residents, they are committed to making referrals to other resources for anyone who contacts them with a legal problem.

In her report to the RLS Annual General Meeting earlier this month, Susan Irwin made the point that while the agency “has demonstrated a tenacity to adjust to a changing service environment, … , our continued physical presence in this rural community will be influenced by the degree of public support for RLS.”

She also said that “mergers or the closure of smaller clinics would not appear to be unrealistic possible outcomes of the review process that Legal Aid Ontario has undertaken.”

While the future of Rural Legal Services may be uncertain, Susan Irwin said she will working hard to somehow maintain a presence in Sharbot Lake for her agency, even if Rural Legal Services is eventually formally merged with the Kingston or Belleville Legal Service offices, which are two of the possibilities down the road.