Peggy Revell
While the shortage of doctors and other medical professionals is nothing new here, there’s another shortage of professionals on the horizon as lawyers from across the district are reaching retirement age—and there are few young ones to take their place to serve the community.
“This is a problem we have been concerned about for a long time now,” said Fort Frances lawyer Clare Brunetta. “It’s what we call the greying of the bar.”
If nothing is done about it, it will result in a lack of affordable and available legal services in Rainy River District, he stressed.
“If you look at our local bar, it’s an old bar,” agreed Ian McLennan, who is retiring after 30 years of practising law in Fort Frances. “Of the group, I may be the first to retire, but there’s lots that potentially see that in their future.
“And the question is, if people don’t come in to replace them, who is going to service the need for lawyers here?” he asked. “And does that mean that people are going to have to go to Dryden, Kenora, and Thunder Bay? The answer is ‘yes.’
“It’s very similar to what the doctors here are experiencing,” McLennan added. “Kids come out of school after six or seven years, with high debt loads. A lot of them have contacts or make contacts in southern Ontario and for that reason don’t come back to this area.
“If you look at who’s practising here now, in terms of coming from Fort Frances . . . basically we’ve had very little new blood come into the area, and that’s the unfortunate side of it,” he remarked. “A lot of the people who have gone into law from here have chosen to move elsewhere, and people from elsewhere haven’t chosen to move here.”
There are multiple reasons why young lawyers are staying in larger urban centres like Toronto, explained local lawyer Clint Calder. While originally from the area, Calder himself moved away to work at a big law firm in Toronto and Vancouver for 15 years before returning to Fort Frances a few years ago.
“One [reason] is that most, or simply many, lawyers prefer to at least get training in large cities,” he noted. “In my case, and in the case of some of the other lawyers in town, that’s certainly what happened.”
There also is a perception that lawyers who work for the big law firms in big cities do more interesting work, Calder added, even if perception isn’t actually an accurate one.
The third reason is that a lawyer can make more money working in the bigger cities, he conceded, while at the same time it’s becoming harder and harder to make a living in a small town.
For example, Calder said one of the changes has been the increasing competition for legal services, especially in real estate.
“Real estate used to be the bread-and-butter of small-town lawyers,” he explained. “Now there’s all kinds of competition there. There are lawyers or even paralegals who will do real estate transactions for rock-bottom fees.
“Therefore lawyers can’t really compete, or if they can compete, they can’t really make any money at it.”
“And the nature of practice has changed so much over the years,” echoed Brunetta, noting that there are certain areas of practice in decline. Certain businesses, such as banks, also have shifted away from using local lawyers to bigger firms, he noted.
To top it off, as the major industries in the area come under more and more pressure, there has been a decreasing demand for legal services, Brunetta added.
This shortage of lawyers is hitting legal aid, as well, said McLennan, who will continue as the area director for legal aid despite his retirement.
“We have tried a few things to try and encourage people to come here, we even had a few positions open up in terms of staff lawyers, but we couldn’t fill them,” he explained. “We’ve had lots of ideas, but now, being a funded agency by the Ontario government, there’s not any new money out there.
“If anything, they’re trying to keep a tight rein on the purse, and I don’t think we can count on initiatives coming from [the province].”
The amount of money lawyers doing legal aid receive is not as high as what can be made in private practices, McLennan added.
“So if you’re coming out with a high debt load, it’s not very attractive,” he remarked. “And if you’re a senior lawyer, unless you’re just looking to scale back and do less work, it’s not that attractive to you, either, because you know you can make more as a private lawyer.”
Ontario legal aid rates have “failed miserably” to keep up with the cost of living, agreed Brunetta, and that means lawyers are choosing to either limit or stop taking legal aid cases altogether.
As well, the decline in local lawyers goes hand in hand with a decrease in judicial services in the area, Brunetta noted.
“We have suffered a loss of judicial services in the district over the years,” he stressed, pointing out that when full-time local judges have retired, those who replace them now are responsible for traveling all across the district to hear cases in different communities.
“We call that flight schedule justice around here,” said Brunetta, who added this means people in their communities and their lawyers have to schedule around when a judge will be in the area, which creates additional inconvenience and expenses.
Yet it’s justified because of the declining demographics in the region, he said, even though it ends up playing back into the problem of fewer lawyers here.
“When you lose the judge, it’s the beginning of a decline,” Brunetta said. “Young lawyers won’t come into the practice if they don’t have access to a full-time legal system.
“At a certain point, the statistics aren’t important. It’s serving the people in the community that’s important,” he stressed. “It’s not just about the numbers.
“We worry about who is going to serve our clients.” he added, noting there already are certain legal issues where help from outside of the area is sought for clients.
“That’s a problem. It’s an access to legal services issue,” Brunetta continued. “Local people want to use local lawyers because they are neighbours, friends, people from the community.”
While it’s somewhat of a popular thing to make jokes about lawyers, Brunetta said people generally like their local lawyer and the important services that they provide—everything from wills to real estate, “essential legal services that the average person uses on a usual basis.”
“As lawyers retire, those are the types of legal services that are going to go missing,” he warned. Already, he noted, there are very few lawyers left in the area who practise family law, which also happens to be the greatest area of need.
“It means increased costs,” McLennan stressed. “Because if you have to pay somebody to come in from Thunder Bay to argue a case for you, they’re going to charge you more because they’ll have to travel, and you’re going to have to deal with them either on the Internet or on the phone, or you’re going to have to travel to see them, or squeeze yourself into the short period of time that they can be here.”
“It really becomes an access to justice issue,” echoed Calder. “It’s fine to say, ‘Well, there’s no one here who will do this for me, so I’ll just go to Thunder Bay.’ Well, that makes it more costly and there are certainly a large portion of the population that can’t afford to do those things, and not only that, they don’t want to.
“A lot of times when it comes to it, you may go to court and you may have your lawyer on a conference screen representing you, and clearly it’s not as effective.”
McLennan himself was unable to find a young lawyer who would take over his whole practice, instead having to pass on any ongoing files to Brunetta or having clients find a new lawyer in the area.
Usually young lawyers join a firm with older lawyers, transition into the firm, and then take over once the older lawyers retire, Brunetta explained. McLennan, for instance, took over the practice after coming on board with Bill Bradley and Theo Wolder, who later both became judges.
“It’s disappointing to see a firm like that just disappear because it’s a loss to the community,” said Brunetta, noting the historical prominence of the practice for the district.
“I think we’re going to see more and more of firms shutting down,” he admitted.
“It’s a problem, not just here,” he continued, pointing out smaller communities across the province also are facing a similar problem on attracting young lawyers—even in larger cities like Guelph, Windsor, Kingston, and Thunder Bay where there are some very accomplished lawyers who specialize in complex law.
Encouraging young lawyers to settle in Northwestern Ontario was one of the reasons behind pushing for a law school in Thunder Bay, explained Lakehead University president Fred Gilbert. But the province denied the university’s request this past summer.
“With the law schools all in the south of the province, it’s natural that [young lawyers] would gravitate towards the larger urban centres in the south,” Gilbert conceded, adding the idea behind bringing a law school to Thunder Bay was similar to why the Northern Ontario School of Medicine was established in the hopes of training and keeping doctors in the area.
“One of the things that we were going to be doing, and what we will do at some time in the future I’m sure when we’re up and running, is provide courses within the curriculum so that someone who is going into small firm practice or sole firm practice has the businesses skills to understand what they need to do to set up law as a business in a smaller community,” Gilbert explained.
The new law school also would have given students the opportunity to focus on areas relevant to Northwestern Ontario, such as aboriginal law and natural resources law.
“It was a bit of a surprise in terms of our proposal because we know and we firmly believe that there is a need, and that the proposal was a good one,” Gilbert said about his reaction to the province’s refusal to allow the new law school at Lakehead U.
“But it was understandable in the sense that [the province was] getting tremendous pressure from a lot of universities saying they wanted to set up a law school, as well.
“So it was one of those situations where I think they just sort of threw up their hands and said, ‘No more, no more at this point in time!’”
“It was a tremendous disappointment to have it shot down in such a cavalier fashion by the ministry,” noted Brunetta, who added a large amount of work, time, and money was put into the proposal by many organizations and people.
“We’ve lost that opportunity in the northwest where we have to struggle to get anything to begin with.”
But Gilbert remains hopeful the province eventually will grant the university’s request.
“I do believe that as we continue to go through the process of accrediting the curriculum, that at some point the province will look at the need, will look at the support that has been received from the Law Society of Upper Canada, and we hope from the National Federation of Law Societies, to say ‘Yes, we will do it at this time,’” he said.
“I’m kind of hoping that there’s still an option that we might be able to open in 2010, but that means that the province would have to take some action during the coming year.”
Despite the downsides, there still are obvious reasons why a lawyer would want to come and practise in a small town, McLennan said.
“You’re in a small community where you know everybody. You can, to some extent, dictate your hours of work,” he explained.
Lawyers in big urban centres like Toronto may have no clue who the other lawyers they’re dealing with are since there’s so many of them, he added, whereas in places like Fort Frances, you know who you are dealing with, you know who you can rely upon, and if something arises, the other lawyers can help you out to an extent.
“Whereas I don’t think you can expect that in a big city,” he said.
“You can be 15 minutes from the lake, from the golf course, curling club,” McLennan added. “Toronto? No way. You have to drive for hours. So there is a lifestyle here that only people who live here can appreciate.”
For Calder, the move to a smaller community means less of a frenzy, an easier commute, and knowing everyone or at least knowing of everyone.
“It’s much more of a collegial type place to work,” he explained. When assisting people with a will, or buying a house, or incorporating a business, he said he can see how much of an impact his work really has.
“It’s more meaningful, at least as far as I’m concerned,” he remarked.
