Families of individuals killed by police will now be entitled to publicly funded lawyers at coroner’s inquests, the province announced Friday. The announcement comes a week after a Star story detailed the plight of the family of Michael MacIsaac, who was shot dead by Durham police Const. Brian Taylor in Ajax in December 2013. The inquest into MacIsaac’s death, where the jury can make non-binding recommendations to prevent similar deaths in the future, is set to begin Monday in Toronto. But his family has had to raise funds for a lawyer, because until now the only provincial program that provided funding for lawyers for families at inquests included the criteria that the deceased person had to have been a victim of crime. As critics have pointed out, the vast majority of police shooting deaths in Ontario, including in the MacIsaac case, do not lead to criminal charges. On the other hand, many other parties at inquests, including the police services board and the individual officers, are funded directly by tax dollars or indirectly through police union dues. Funding for lawyers for families at police shooting inquests was also one of 129 recommendations from Court of Appeal Justice Michael Tulloch, whose review of the province’s police oversight bodies was made public in April. “Acting on this recommendation from Justice Tulloch is the right thing to do,” said Community Safety and Correctional Services Minister Marie-France Lalonde in a statement. “We will move quickly to implement a new program that responds to the needs of families who participate in these inquests.”The guidelines for the new funding program and application will be posted on the ministry’s website July 20. “Obviously, from a financial perspective, I certainly feel relieved, and I’m happy that going forward this is going to change for any other family, that they won’t have this stress,” Michael MacIsaac’s s ...
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