Everyone is in favour of lawyers who provide services pro bono.
It’s a motherhood-and-apple-pie issue to which it would be hard to raise objections. With access to justice a growing concern, lawyers who help people for free receive deserved praise.
So, we have people like former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry, who is now leading the Ontario civil legal needs project, urging the legal community to do more to facilitate pro bono work.

Other leaders, including a former attorney general, have made similar entreaties. In the meantime, debate has continued over whether to impose a mandatory requirement that lawyers do a certain amount of work for free.

To be sure, there have been signs of progress. Several years ago, Pro Bono Law Ontario started up to help practitioners do good works for people unable to afford representation.

At the same time, the Law Society of Upper Canada adopted a bylaw waiving licensing fees for lawyers wanting to provide services pro bono. Still, access to justice remains a pressing concern.

But as the issue lingers, in walks Mukhtiar Dahiya. For some time, the lawyer has proposed helping Toronto’s homeless population for free. At 58 and with a disability, he doesn’t care about billing clients.

Nevertheless, he has shied away from his street advocacy proposal due to law society and LawPRO rules. That’s because he wants them to cover his licensing and insurance fees to facilitate his practice.

Their policies, however, allow that to happen only if he agrees to work with an approved program through PBLO. Other law societies have similar requirements.

As a result, Dahiya’s proposed good works are going undone. For its part, the LSUC says the rules aim to ensure the lawyers it helps are competent and therefore able to provide appropriate legal services. That’s a legitimate aim given its responsibility to uphold professionalism in the industry.

Still, there should at least be an effort to find an alternative. Dahiya doesn’t want to work through PBLO because, he says, “Through charity, I cannot achieve anything.” His words may be an overstatement, but it is true that there are lone rangers in society whose alternative ways of doing things nevertheless have value.

While there’s no evidence this is the case with PBLO-approved programs, it is a fact that many so-called charitable organizations get caught up with their own interests, such as the administrative minutiae of reporting to funders or raising money through expensive events, rather than helping the people they’re supposed to serve. So, people like Dahiya have legitimate concerns.

Hopefully, then, the legal community will find some way to help him take to the streets. Solutions could include supervision of his work or some sort of formal relationship with the organization he wants to start, the City Law Centre.

It’s possible Dahiya himself is being difficult, so resolving the issue might require compromise on his part, too. But it would be well worth the effort. Dahiya may be on a different track but he wants to do exactly what the profession has been advocating for.