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.
Read more about this topic: Legal Aid Ontario
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)