Aid Services: Aid and Budget

aid services: Legal Aid Ontario, which threatened to reduce services for refugee clients last year amid a budget crisis, received 13.7 million from Ottawa in 2016, but will see its share in 2017 reduced to 8.6 million, said Toronto lawyer Raoul Boulakia, who sits on Legal Aid Ontario's refugee law advisory committee, according to Hamilton Spectator. Ensuring adequate funding for legal aid is a shared provincial and federal responsibility. In its 2017 budget announced last week, the federal government said it would provide 62.9 million over five years or 12.6 million annually until 2022 for provincial legal aid services across the country to assist with asylum claims, with the budget falling back to 11.5 million a year thereafter. The governments of Canada and Ontario should not allow legal aid funding to fall short of what is really needed, said Boulakia. Over the last few years, Ontario received 7 million a year from Ottawa to cover refugee legal aid services accounting for one-third of the province's spending on refugee legal services. The funding required to ensure legal aid services is a tiny fraction of any government's budget, but the impact on the people who need these services is enormous. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.