Chris Young/Canadian Press Ontario ministers Lisa MacLeod and Caroline Mulroney sit at Queen's Park in Toronto on Sept. 12, 2018. The auditor general says that Legal Aid Ontario spends $20 million a year appealing the decisions of the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).

TORONTO — Mark Cannon says defending his need for disability support in front of Ontario's Social Benefits Tribunal felt like the Spanish Inquisition. The Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) recipient in Waterford, Ont., had to get a lawyer through legal aid after he was denied benefits in 2012. "My laundry list of health issues hadn't been enough to qualify ... I had to go to downtown Hamilton and meet with this person and humiliate and embarrass myself," he told HuffPost Canada in an email. I felt like I was begging for a pittance.Mark Cannon The 55-year-old says his doctors were shocked that he was denied disability support. Cannon worked in the construction industry for 30 years, but stopped working after what he describes as a string of "botched" knee surgeries. He's also suffered a heart attack, has Type 2 Diabetes and osteoarthritis. "I felt like I was begging for a pittance." The Ontario government spends $20 million a year on legal aid for people fighting its own ministry's decisions on disability benefits, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk wrote in her annual report released Wednesday. Three-quarters of those people win their appeals, and should have been given ODSP payments in the first place. ODSP appeals make up more than 40 per cent of the workload for community legal clinics. Last year, clinics handled more than 9,400 of these cases, Lysyk's report says.

Nathan Denette/Canadian Press Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk releases the 2018 annual report at Queen's Park in Toronto on Dec. 5, 2018.

If Legal Aid Ontario and ODSP resolve this, clinics can return millions of dollars back to taxpayers, or spend it on employment issues, human rights law and expanding services for seniors, the report said. The Progressive Conservative minister responsible, Lisa MacLeod, told reporters Wednesday that her office is on it. "We addressed this a couple of weeks ago when we said we're going to better align our definition [of disability] with the federal government," the minister of children, community and social services said at a press conference about the auditor general's report. "That work is happening now." Last month, MacLeod announced that her ministry will overhaul the way Ontario delivers social assistance. The new definition of disability is more narrow, advocates say, and will exclude some people with episodic disabilities and mental health disabilities. Watch HuffPost Canada's series on the short-lived Ontario basic income pilot: