Access to Justice for Indigenous Persons Being Sentenced in Ontario: An Approach to Wicked Problems

In 1996, Parliament passed s.718.2(e) of the criminal code of Canada. In doing so, recognized the injustices experienced by Indigenous populations at the hands of our criminal justice system. Nearly 26 years later, and Indigenous overrepresentation in custody across Canada is still rising. This pattern of injustice raises the question, what is stopping Indigenous persons from accessing justice? By exploring the field of access to justice and defining access to justice as containing procedural, substantive and symbolic elements, this thesis applied a unique approach to measuring access to justice based on the leading approaches of access to justice research. By focusing on the experiences of defence counsel who work within the Gladue framework of sentencing and applying an expansive conception of access to justice to guide the inquiry, this thesis attempts to shed light on the barriers to accessing justice that are faced by Indigenous persons being sentenced.