Legal Aid Ontario - Criticism

Criticism

In February, 2008, the organization was criticized in an 87 page report by the Ontario Ombudsman for a mishandling of funds in the legal defence of Richard Wills. The report, A Test of Wills, explains: "Legal Aid Ontario had estimated that Mr. Wills’ defence would cost $50,000. When it was done, it in fact cost more than a million dollars". Mr. Wills, considered to be a person of means to fund his own defence, was charged with the murder of his longtime lover. In the months preceding his trial he had transferred his assets into his wife's name. Subsequently, he applied to Legal Aid Ontario where he was effectively provided a “no check/blank cheque” defence.

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)

    However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)