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:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)