N.S. housing advocate calls for increased funding after swamped legal aid service cuts walk-ins

A community worker with the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service says the office is dealing with more tenancy cases than it can handle.

A community worker with the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service says the office is dealing with more tenancy cases than it can handle.

Joanne Hussey says the number of renters seeking out free legal help to deal with evictions has reached the point where the office has been forced to eliminate its walk-in service for the month of May.

“We’ve decided to pause our drop-in intakes, which usually happens twice a week,” says Hussey.

Hussey says the office normally sees about 10 drop-ins each time.

Part of the challenge, she says, is the sheer volume of cases she and the other community legal worker are handling.

“But also, we are a teaching clinic, so we have new students who are joining us at this point and so we’ll be spending some time training them,” Hussey adds. “We’ve generally been able to make it work during those student transitions, but this time we just felt we needed to take that break.”

Hussey says since September, Dalhousie Legal Aid has worked with 102 households facing eviction, compared with the 30 households the clinic assisted during the same period the previous year. She says where the clinic’s work was once equally divided between tenancy issues and income assistance cases, that has since shifted almost entirely to tenancies.