Aboriginal Legal Services
211 Yonge St, #500 m5b1m4 Toronto, ON, Canada

We are hiring! ALS is posting for 2021/2022 Miziwe Biik funded positions. These positions are all full time one-year contracts. This is a good opportunity for those who need valuable work experience to start or advance their careers. Applicants must reside in Toronto GTA and they must be registered with Miziwe Biik and working with an Employment Counsellor. ... positions available are: ARTICLING STUDENT TRAINEE COURTWORKER TRAINEE EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TRAINEE HR ASSISTANT TRAINEE OPERATIONS ASSISTANT TRAINEE TENANT RIGHTS ADVOCATE TRAINEE VICTIM RIGHTS ADVOCATE TRAINEE WELCOME HOME ASSISTANT TRAINEE Link to postings on ALS website: http://aboriginallegal.ca/employment.html Link to postings on Miziwe Biik Job Board: https://miziwebiik.com/services/jobs/ Please share the news broadly with eligible candidates within your friends, family, and community. If you know anyone with similar qualifications, you are encouraged to inform them about these opportunities. Candidates can send their resumes to [email protected], with their resume and an explanation on why they are interested in these positions. The deadline to apply is 12th March 2021.

Are you an Indigenous person interested in law school? Come meet some of the best lawyers in Ontario, hear their stories and career advice!

https://www.cbc.ca//indigenous/bc-health-care-racism-repor

https://www.theglobeandmail.com//article-health-experts-u/

If you were supposed to attend court in Toronto after the pandemic started and you aren't sure what to do now, you can call the courtworkers at Aboriginal Legal Services. They can find out when your next court date is, help you find a lawyer and find out if your charges can be diverted. Their contact information is below. Old City Hall, Cristina Nebenionquit: 416-408-4041 x. 203 and [email protected] Old City Hall (trainee), Pamela McNeil: 416-408-4041 x. 202 and [email protected] College Park, Jacob Washington: 416-408-4041 x. 201 and [email protected] 2201 Finch/Mobile, Patricia Watetch: 416-209-2953 and [email protected] 1000 Finch/Scarborough, Sue MacLennan: 647-889-8858 and [email protected] 311 Jarvis (criminal), Joanna Wemigwans: 416-408-4041 x. 204 and [email protected] 311 Jarvis (family), Lana Morissette: 416-408-4041 x. 205 and [email protected] See more

After ALS participated in the inquest into Brian Sinclair's death, we joined the Brian Sinclair working group to address racism in health care. The death of Joyce Echaquan reminds us how necessary this work continues to be. Please sign this letter to support adding an anti-racism pillar to the Canada Health Act.

Aboriginal Legal Services was at the Supreme Court yesterday to support changes to the law to ensure Indigenous people get to serve on juries. We are pleased with the decision the Supreme Court issued. https://www.cbc.ca//stefanovich-supreme-court-hearing-pere

No one should be evicted during a pandemic. Help Aboriginal Legal Services and others protect tenants. Send a letter to Ontario leadership to #stopunsafeevictions by restoring the court-ordered moratorium on residential evictions that was put in place in March. https://act.newmode.net/action/stop-unsafe-evictions

London Police Officer Nicholas Doering sentenced to 12 months incarceration for death of Debra Chrisjohn - For Immediate Release

We are hiring! We’re hiring a passionate Youth Addiction and Mental Health caseworker for our Toronto office. To learn more and apply see the posting attached,

Take action: The landlords and lawyers that apply for evictions and threaten our homes also have homes. As long as they threaten ours, they will not be allowed ...to sit comfortably in theirs. We can find where they live and work. We can go to them directly and demand their threats stop. If eviction hearings at the Landlord and Tenant Board start up again, they will move as quickly as they can. We can stop them. With enough people we can make it impossible for them to push through eviction hearings and worsen the existing crisis of homelessness Toronto faces. If an eviction is ordered by the Board, anyone that tries to drag our neighbours out of their homes will have to go through organized tenants first. We are in this together. Let’s act like it. Visit keepyourrent.com for information, materials and contacts that will help you organize with your neighbours and connect with organized neighbourhoods across Toronto.

Come one, come all! We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a second round of COVID-19 testing on July 7th, in Trinity Square. We are extremely grate...ful to Toronto Urban Native Ministry, our partner organization for arranging this ongoing testing series. They are dedicated to a culturally safe and welcoming response to COVID-19, which has been an immense asset to our communities in their prevention efforts. See more

Leslie Anne is a member of the ALS Board and a recent grad of U of T Law!

Jessie Stirling is the Secretary of the Board of ALS and a recent grad of U of T Law!

Aboriginal Legal Services wants to learn about Indigenous artists and the issues and injustices they experience in their arts practices. Please follow the link to fill out the our survey. https://docs.google.com//1FAIpQLSesEGJbGJh79rh97J/viewform

If we defund the police, will we need fewer jails and prisons? By Alyshah HashamCourts Reporter Toronto Star Sun., June 21, 2020timer6 min. read... Outside police headquarters in downtown Toronto on Friday, giant pink letters painted on the road proclaimed the demand protesters have been making for weeks: defund the police. In response to police brutality, racial profiling and the police-involved deaths of Black and Indigenous people, they are calling to redirect money spent on police into communities, housing, education, transit and mental health, and for the decriminalization of drug use, sex work and minor offences such as transit fare evasion. If their calls are answered it would mean far fewer people in custody. This, in turn, has some people demanding we defund the jail and prison system, in addition to the police. The fact that the Ontario jail population could be reduced by more than 30 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic has been held up as a sign of what is possible. The decrease in jail numbers was due to a combination of factors, including more people being granted bail, suspending weekend sentences, delayed sentencing hearings involving custodial sentences, fewer arrests and early releases. These are people who, under the logic of the system as it was, shouldn’t have been behind bars anyway, said Justin Piché, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa. What are we doing taking people who are living safely among us during the week and sending them behind bars on the weekend? Defunding police and defunding jails are part of the same conversation, said Anthony Morgan, a human rights lawyer whose brother is incarcerated. You create a lot of supply through policing. You overpolice communities Black, Indigenous and racialized communities, impoverished folks, folks living with mental health challenges and so you create a massive supply of folks that would need to then be incarcerated. Reducing that supply automatically shrinks the jail and prison population, Morgan said, and it allows for the money saved to be invested in community alternatives to jail that contribute far more to public safety than time spent in custody. The system is not structured to rehabilitate. We need to stop relying on this falsity. It helps us feel more comfortable with what is a really brutal system, Morgan said. If we ran a program that failed as much as the criminal justice system, we would not be funded. We would not be able to operate, said Jonathan Rudin, program director at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. And we just keep throwing money at it and keep relying on it even though it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Most sentences in Canada are very short. More than half of those handed down in adult courts are less than one month. Only 20 percent of all sentences are more than six months, and only 3.6 percent result in prison sentences of more than two years. When someone goes to jail for 30 or 15 days we think, ‘Oh, they’ll learn a lesson.’ But what actually ends up happening is that people lose their homes, they lose their place in programming, they lose access to services. Women, in particular, lose access to their children, Rudin says. None of those things are going to make a person’s life better. None of those things are going to make it easier to navigate the challenges they face We’re just being cruel for the sake of being cruel. About 70 percent of inmates in provincial jails are awaiting trial and are legally innocent, he noted. Black and Indigenous people are less likely to get bail than white people charged with the same crimes and face more onerous release conditions that can lead to more charges and convictions. The bail process disproportionately penalizes and frequently criminalizes poverty, addiction, and mental health issues, according to a 2015 Canadian Civil Liberties Association report called Set Up to Fail. It can also push people to plead guilty to get out of jail sooner, said Rudin. There are wrongful convictions occurring every day in every court in Ontario, he said. High rates of recidivism continue, especially for Indigenous people, because the current system doesn’t work, Rudin said. But programs that divert people away from the criminal justice system and into appropriate supports and services that address the root causes of what occurred have proven to be successful, he said. That leads to safer communities, Rudin said. It’s not a question of if this works. We know these things work. It’s a question of will. Several reports have documented a critical lack of support for the growing number of inmates with mental health conditions, as well as a lack of access to rehabilitative programs and increased violence among inmates, and between inmates and correctional officers. Conditions at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont. including frequent lockdowns, limited access to phone calls and no programming recently prompted a five-day hunger strike by inmates. A report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator released Friday raised concern about the impact of severe restrictions on inmates over the past three months, noting that indefinite lockdowns or extended periods of cellular isolation continue at many prisons, even where there has been no outbreak of coronavirus. What is our responsibility as a society to hold accountable these systems that are alleging to be helping people? These are the systems that we are entrusting with some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people, said Idil Abdillahi, an assistant professor of social work at Ryerson University who works with incarcerated individuals. We really have to think about what is actually happening and what are the outcomes we are seeing. The pandemic has exposed how little support inmates have while transitioning back into the community after being in jail, says Rajean Hoilett, an organizer with the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project. The group has been raising money for an emergency support fund to assist inmates and their families with costs such as expensive phone bills racked up while in-person visits are banned, and with basic needs after being released. They have received close to 400 applications for help so far. We’ve seen a lot of folks who’ve been released without any support, who are telling us they don’t have shoes, they don’t have clothes, they don’t have food, they don’t have a place to go, said Hoilett. We know that there’s a lot of folks who use drugs who are coming out without any sort of harm reduction supplies, and we already know we’ve lost people in this way to overdoses. The risk of overdose after being released from jail is well known. An inquest into the opioid overdose death of Brad Chapman, a 43-year-old man who cycled in and out of jail, identified a desperate need for better support for former inmates. The province announced last week that it would be spending $500 million over five years on upgrading aging jails and hiring more front-line staff, including corrections officers, nurses and social workers. But better jails and prisons are not what people are calling for as they protest in the streets, Morgan said. They are calling for an entirely different approach. I think we are in a moment now, when we have people’s imagination, to imagine something better, said Hoilett. To imagine something that isn’t harming our communities in these ways.

Caitlyn Kasper, a lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto, said the problem with police services is that they have historically been used by governments as tools of oppression. They are also ill equipped to de-escalate situations and provide basic help, particularly when it comes to Indigenous people, she said.

In Response to the COVID 19 pandemic Thunder Woman Healing Lodge has launched a program to assist individuals being discharged from Correctional Institutions an...d jails. TWHLS is providing transportation, access to COVID testing, food, and shelter relief for Indigenous men and women seeking safety upon discharge. This program has been made possible with the support and partnership of MizweBiik Development Corporation, the Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council (TASSC), Toronto Native Council Fire Friendship Centre, Native Women’s Resource Centre, Elizabeth Fry Toronto, Aboriginal Legal Services and Women’s College Hospital.