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In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of individuals who address a legal issue without the assistance of legal representation.  Statistical data generated by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) indicates that approximately 11.4 million people in Canada will experience at least one everyday legal problem in a given three-year period.[1]  It is further reported that approximately “50% of people try to resolve their problems on their own with no or minimal legal or authoritative non-legal assistance.”

http://cfcj-fcjc.org/a2jblog/a-changing-role-for-lawyers-in-the-age-of-self-represented-litigants

David Engel’s recent book, The Myth of the Litigious Society, has its roots in a piece published over two decades ago, by UCLA’s Richard Abel. In that piece, Abel challenged conventional wisdom by declaring that the “real tort crisis” is an epidemic, not of overclaiming, but rather, the opposite. The tort system’s greatest defect, Abel asserted, is not its whimsical unpredictability or its excessive generosity. To the contrary, the tort system’s biggest shortcoming is that too few accident victims choose to enter the system at all.

http://torts.jotwell.com/iso-the-missing-plaintiff/

A recent ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Quebec Court of Appeal’s decision against two car accident victims in two separate cases. The Supreme Court ruling laid out that a car accident victim who receives compensation from Quebec’s public automobile insurance plan cannot sue third parties for ‘aggravated’ or ‘separate’ aspects of their injuries given there is “plausible, logical and sufficiently close link” between the accident and the subsequent events.

https://www.deutschmannlaw.com/blog/post/supreme-court-bars-civil-lawsuits-against-hospitals-and-police-in-cases-of-car-accident-victims-compensated-by-the-saaq

We think of pain as a symptom, but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself. Starting with the story of a girl whose sprained wrist turned into a nightmare, Elliot Krane talks about the complex mystery of chronic pain, and reviews the facts we’re just learning about how it works and how to treat it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6–CMhcCfQ

One in five Canadians will experience a mental illness at some point in their life and many of those people may seek disability payments to help them cope, but experts say the process is often so complicated and mental illness is so misunderstood by employers that workers run into trouble getting the help they need.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hard-at-work-disability-claims-1.4067689

Disabled people in Ontario are much more likely to experience poverty than non-disabled people. Many have to live on sub poverty payments under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or the even more wretched income provided by Ontario Works (OW). Those that are in this situation are confronted by an ongoing process of surveillance, invasion of their privacy and moral policing.

https://ocaptoronto.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/what-basic-income-means-for-disabled-people/

Recommendations

• The government should not move to a government-run auto insurance system at this time. There is an opportunity to learn from past experience and fix the problems in the current auto insurance delivery system in Ontario as described in this report.
• Ontario’s current no-fault benefits should not be reduced.

http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/autoinsurance/fair-benefits-recommendations.html

A report just released by the Ontario government takes a look at the region’s auto insurance industry and offers a number of recommendations to address several issues deemed to be plaguing the sector.

http://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/ca/news/auto/revealed-ontario-governments-auto-insurance-report-65096.aspx