It is 10 a.m. on Tuesday and the wooden benches in a small, windowless courtroom at the downtown College Park courthouse are starting to fill up.Ten people are waiting for their names to be called so they set their next court date and it’s impossible to tell who among them have lawyers and who don’t.Near the front, one woman is fiddling with a handful of coins that she keeps dropping onto the carpeted floor. Eventually, she will fall asleep on the bench and it’s only at noon, after all the matters that morning have been heard, that a court officer gently wakes her up and asks her name. Before the Ford government’s cuts to legal aid in June, duty counsel — the publicly funded lawyers who give immediate legal assistance to low-income people who appear in court without a lawyer — would have been staffing this courtroom. But last month Legal Aid Ontario made changes in response to the cuts, including requiring duty counsel to conduct almost all bail hearings for low-income people without representation, not private lawyers paid through legal aid certificates. To accommodate this, duty counsel services have been scaled back elsewhere.Lawyers who regularly appear in courts across the provinces have seen the resulting confusion firsthand and the College Park courthouse on Tuesday is no exception. The “confusing mess,” as Dana Fisher, the union spokesperson for legal aid lawyers, described it, will impact vulnerable, low-income accused the most — delaying how long they stay in jail before getting bail, forcing them to come to court for hours every few weeks to speak the court themselves to set a new court date, or leaving them without proper legal advice before entering a guilty plea.At some courthouses it means duty counsel is only available on request for mental health or Gladue courts — where cases involved Indigenous accused are heard — which can cause long delays, Fisher said. People without private ...
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