OCAP Wins Another Disability Appeal

Over a year ago Mr. Peters came to OCAP in what he felt was an impossible situation. He had applied for ODSPA (Ontario Disability Support Program Assistance) a few times and had been refused on each occasion. He was working through another application and had come to the point where the adjudication board had told him he was not a disabled person. Mr. Peters had appealed this decision and had retained a lawyer. At this meeting his lawyer told him that there was no way they could win this case and that Mr. Peters came to my office from this in an extremely agitated mood and asked if there was any way OCAP could help.

I talked to Mr. Peters' lawyer to see if there was any hope there and realized he would lose if he continued with this lawyer. Consequently Mr. Peters fired his lawyer and got OCAP to take on his case.

After going through the disclosure (the forms Mr. Peters' doctor had filled out for ODSPA) I realized why Mr. Peters lawyer had shown such a bad attitude. These forms were not supportive of Mr. Peters in any way. While it was clear I could not use these forms in defence of my client I also knew my client suffered from severe depression and had tried to take his own life on numerous occasions. I decided to look into Mr. Peters' past. I wrote to every doctor he had seen in the last 10 years; family doctors, psychiatrists, and doctors who had been responsible for him during hospital stays. I got back over 200 pages of information and faxed it all to the adjudication unit. A week later we received a letter saying they had gone through the new information and had decided that Mr. Peters was a person with a disability.