Senior law students working under the supervision of the two community legal workers at Dalhousie Legal Aid help to provide legal information relating to employment support and income assistance as well as residential tenancies issues. The legal aid services began collecting data in September 2022. Since then, they found at least 91 per cent of the appointments were related to residential tenancies issues.

“We wanted to get a better idea of who was using our services and what kind of services we were providing,” said Joanne Hussey, one of the community legal workers at Dalhousie Legal Aid.

Almost half of the people seeking information from the legal team were facing eviction and more than 30 per cent of households were seeking information about fixed-term leases, the legal service reported.

Prior to collecting the data, the legal aid office knew they did an even amount of employment support and income assistance compared to residential tenancies issues.

“With this new information we can see what we knew was happening, which was that almost all of the folks coming to us in the last 10 months were coming to us with residential tenancies issues,” Hussey said.

The data collection has also helped put the numbers on paper for when the legal aid office is reporting things like a rise in legal support relating to tenancies issues.

“Sometimes when we would go to the government and say ‘this is a problem,’ the response would be that ‘that’s an anecdotal problem,’ Hussey said.

Service Nova Scotia, the department responsible for residential tenancies, doesn’t have any publicly available information about residential tenancies, which makes it hard to understand how they are making changes, Hussey explained.

“It would be really helpful to have more information about what is actually going on so that we could be more specific about what we are suggesting,” Hussey says.

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