Last week, spent in Toronto, ended my five-week PLE research tour of eastern Canada. Ontario, and Toronto in particular, is a very special place for public legal education in Canada. Not only is Ontario home to the unique and famous community legal clinic system, and not only are each of those clinics mandated to provide public legal education and engage in community development, but one of those clinics is devoted entirely to initiating and supporting PLE projects in the province.
That clinic, Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO), is one of the most well-staffed sole-purpose PLEI organizations in Canada, employing multiple full-time staff lawyers and plain language editors. CLEO’s core service is the production and distribution of plain language publications, but it also maintains CLEONet (a huge clearinghouse website of Ontario PLE materials from many organizations) and has just launched a program to provide PLE publications and audio in six languages other than English and French (the languages that CLEO has previously focused on). Operating since 1974 (and previously called the Toronto Community Law Program), CLEO is also one of the oldest independent PLE organizations in Canada.
Important too, though, is the substantial PLEI work being done by community legal clinics throughout Ontario. “Specialty” clinics, such as Justice for Children and Youth and the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, produce their own PLEI materials and send their staff attorneys into Ontario communities to deliver workshops and classes on legal issues. “General” clinics, which serve a specified geographic community, also spend significant percentages (as much as 15%) of staff time on PLE activities.
Also based in Toronto is the staff of the Ontario Justice Education Network (OJEN), a very young PLE—or rather “justice education”—provider. OJEN, formed in 2002 at the initiation of Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry and partially modeled on the Law Courts Education Society of BC, works with regional committees of lawyers, judges, educators, and other community representatives to build understanding of the justice system. At the core of OJEN’s programming is its Courtrooms and Classrooms program, which facilitates learning and exchange between schools and the courts.
Even this lengthy description doesn’t exhaust all I saw in Toronto, though. Public legal education seems to have earned a lasting and constituent place in the justice and legal services environment of Ontario.
