Queen’s alumna and previous visiting scholar, Lydia Stewart-Ferreira, Law’00, is advancing an ambitious access to justice research project funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario. In this project, she is developing research to support the creation of a program that will help older adults navigate the legal system with the assistance of trusted “intermediaries,” which include doctors, social workers, and people working in the service sector. 

Accessing credible legal information and legal services, she notes, can be difficult for some older adults who may be unaware of their legal rights or who potentially face barriers accessing legal information based on internet access/literacy, language comprehension, availability of transportation, and other factors. 

“There is a great deal of legal information and related services that are credible and available to people free of charge; it’s just not somehow getting to those who need it. How can we do that?” Stewart-Ferreira asks. 

To plan and undertake the research project, she formed a workgroup bringing together representatives from the Research Institute for Aging at Waterloo University, Conestoga College, St. Jerome’s College, the Schlegel Villages, and the Village of Taunton Mills in Whitby.

The research initiative, entitled “Trusted Help Project in a Retirement Community in Ontario,” involves three-phases of research. While the phase three pilot test was temporarily put on hold as a result of the global pandemic, the first two completed phases explored existing public legal resources, such as Pro Bono Law Ontario’s programs, the Community Legal Education Ontario’s (CLEO) initiatives and services, Unifor’s pre-paid legal services for its members, and educational programs for retirees. As well, a needs assessment of residents and potential trusted intermediaries in the Village of Taunton Mills, a retirement village in Whitby, Ont., was conducted and analyzed. The project’s objective is to “connect the dots,” Stewart-Ferreira says, between the broad range of existing publicly available legal resources and older adults through the use of intermediaries also known as “navigators:” trusted community members who can provide support accessing these credible existing legal resources and information. 

The project’s community-centered approach has already identified who some of these potential navigators could be. “It’s not for us to tell the community; it’s for us to listen to what the community wants,” she says. Navigators can provide navigation to legal information, help individuals complete legal forms, and accompany individuals to legal appointments. The project’s research revealed that family and service workers could be trusted individuals by village residents and were often asked for direction on legal matters, such as updating a will. Linking what already exists – credible legal information and community members able to serve as intermediaries to the information — not only increases access to justice for older adults, but also prevents potential larger and more costly future legal problems. “You would rather have a will in place, for example, than trying to figure out, when someone has passed away, what happens now,” Stewart-Ferreira says. 

The project makes an important distinction that these trusted intermediaries / navigators do not provide legal advice, rather they can help direct older adults to credible legal information so that the individual can use the information to support their own decision making, whether it’s navigating a legal process by themselves or seeking help from a legal practitioner to get professional legal advice. “This is very much a philosophy from the health sector, whereby effective management now can help avert and avoid more complicated issues later,” she says. 

With an extensive background in public health, including being a member on numerous hospital and university research ethics boards, Stewart-Ferreira brings a public health lens to her legal work and research projects. With a PhD in law from Osgoode, she has taught public health law at numerous schools in Ontario. She earned her JD at Queen’s as a mature student and while pregnant with her daughter. “That made it a little bit of a different experience, but I really enjoyed my time at Queen’s,” she recalls. “The students were great; the classes were great.” 

Stewart-Ferreira brings this wealth of experience to her LFO project. Public health law has more to do with issues of tensions between the state and the individual than it has to do with issues of medical malpractice, she points out. Among the core values of the health care sector in Canada are universal access (“your health situation, not your ability to pay for a health service is what is important”) and prevention, where it is better to take actions to prevent illnesses rather than deal with the treatment of the full-fledged illness. She sees the legal sector similarly, with core pillars of access and preventative measures to avoid legal crisis. The two come together in her current project. 

“Just because you’re accessing justice doesn’t mean you’re accessing the courtroom,” she explains. “It might mean you’re accessing credible legal information. It might mean you’re accessing credible legal services from a licensed provider.” Navigators can play a role in ensuring that access and prevention can be met even before the courtroom. “In my mind there are so many access to justice issues before you even get to court,” she adds.

While Stewart-Ferreira waits for pandemic restrictions to ease to allow access to the retirement village to complete the test pilot phase of the project, she has new research ideas on her mind. She hopes to explore further the intersection of health law policy and issues of bioethics and biosecurity, topics that the current pandemic has laid bare. “Often when you say public health law, you think ‘that’s a medical thing,’ but it’s really not,” she explains. “When you talk about public health, it’s really about balancing the power between the state and the individual.” She’s also interested in pursuing further research on many of the pandemic-related legal and bioethical issues such as patents on vaccines and vaccine passports. “It’s very timely, public health law and the current situation,” she says.

Read about Queen’s Elder Law Clinic (QELC), which provides legal support to older adults in the Kingston area.

By Geena Mortfield