On Monday June 1, 2009, the CLA Executive Board announced its resolution to request senior Toronto members not to take legal aid certificates in Guns & Gangs and homicide cases, effective immediately. Since that time, a large number of senior and junior Toronto members have pledged their commitment to this resolution, as have large numbers of lawyers in a number of other regions across the Province of Ontario. The purpose of this public resolution is to highlight a notorious imbalance in Ontario's criminal justice system between the government's funding of police and prosecution resources and legal aid defence counsel resources. This imbalance, and the urgent need to redress it, has been recognized by every expert body that has studied the matter. Government has repeatedly promised to fix it for years, but has not. All persons charged with criminal offences across Ontario, including the poor and underprivileged, deserve the right to be defended by adequately resourced and fairly compensated defence lawyers. Our criminal justice system's proper, fair and efficient operation depends as much on skilled and effective defence lawyers being willing and able to fight criminal cases, as it does on properly resourced and compensated police, prosecutors and judges. The Ontario legal aid system has been so consistently underresourced over the past 20 years that it is now chronically unable to ensure that underprivileged and poor criminal defendants get their fair day in court. The government must take immediate steps to fix it.
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