Who remembers that it was the Progressive Conservatives who created the legal aid plan in Ontario that was once the envy of the world?

Who remembers why they did it?

A democratic society is an ongoing pact between its individual members. It’s an agreement not to take a limited and specified number of liberties against one another in exchange for the security provided by the collective. We give up the ability to steal from and assault one another, for example, to secure our own property and persons. We make such anti-social “freedoms” illegal.

But what happens to a society when the profession we’ve created to ensure its individual members don’t unjustly lose any of their legal freedoms becomes accessible only to those who are well-off?

What happens to that society when it starts taking away the very liberty of its other members unfairly by failing to provide them with the means to retain an independent defence lawyer to represent them?

And what happens when the realization occurs to apparatuses of that society — like the police — that they can deny certain individuals justice and fairness simply by accusing them? When they realize such individuals cannot possibly compete with the state’s narratives against them without advocates of their own in a justice system that is organized entirely upon the adversarial system of determining guilt and innocence?

The Star and contributors to the Star have already perceptively and comprehensively documented how the currently proposed changes to legal aid in Ontario by the Ford government will leave thousands upon thousands of poor Ontarians without legal representation if charged with a criminal offence.

I am a criminal defence lawyer. I was lucky enough many years ago to reach a point in my practice where I could stop having to represent people on legal aid. I still did, mind you, until I finally had enough of the degradation and frustration a defence lawyer has to endure doing it: woefully inadequate budgets for preparation, hourly rates that leave little left after the expenses of a practice, having to write pages upon pages to justify the most minor but obviously necessary disbursements — the list goes on and on.

But again, I’ve been lucky. Very lucky. Most criminal defence lawyers have already had to sacrifice any semblance of a comfortable or even secure existence to represent the poor on legal aid as it has been. I have no idea how they’re going to manage now.

Let me ask and answer two questions: why do they do it, and why should we care?

They do it for a host of very noble reasons but most would at least acknowledge they do it for more cynical ones as well.

They do it because they know and fear the answers to the other questions I posed at the beginning of this argument. They know they are all that stands between a society that can at least make some claim it provides its poorest members a chance of justice, fairness and security as individuals and a completely arbitrary and cruel one.

And they know too many people will opt out of the rules of society and take liberties against society if there is no one to champion them when society accuses and prosecutes them. Many defence lawyers imagine themselves radicals, but most are conservatives in the very best sense of the word.

It should now be obvious why we should care about what happens to these lawyers. For years they’ve been holding on in the face of cut after cut and they cannot hold on any longer. They will have to employ their considerable skills in other, lucrative areas of the law or leave law entirely.

Once they’re gone — once their mentorship of new defence lawyers is gone — it will take decades to replace them.

We’ll be left with a society with travesties of justice like the one the Ontario Court of Appeal recently had to correct where a Hamilton trial judge and Crown made a man who couldn’t read represent himself in a trial where the Crown’s case against him included two large boxes of documentary materials. We’ll be left with a society where people feel justified disrespecting its laws.

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We should be insisting on a robust legal aid plan because it’s an essential feature of an unequal society that still aspires to be fair. But if that doesn’t move you to care, be moved to preserve your own security. To turn a phrase of one of the fathers of the U.S. Constitution, there can be no security for anyone in a society without legal champions for everyone.

The Bill Davis Progressive Conservatives of the 1970s and first half of the 1980s understood this. The current incantation of the party seems much more prepared to risk the security of all Ontarians.