Income Security Advocacy Centre (ISAC)

About Income Security Advocacy Centre (ISAC)

The Income Security Advocacy Centre, known by its bilingual name ISAC (Centre d'action pour securite du revenu), is a specialty legal clinic established in 2001 in partnership with Legal Aid Ontario. It doesn't take on individual clients the way a private firm does. Instead it holds a provincial mandate to advance the rights of low income Ontarians in income security programs such as Ontario Works, the Ontario Disability Support Program, Employment Insurance, CPP and OAS, working through test case litigation, policy advocacy, community organizing and public education. Anyone who needs individual legal advice is referred to their local community legal clinic through Legal Aid Ontario.

ISAC is governed by a volunteer, fifteen person community based Board of Directors drawn from all four regions of Ontario, including clinic representatives and people with lived experience of poverty or disability. The clinic works closely with the network of community legal clinics across the province, along with anti poverty groups, academics and the private bar. Its litigation has reached the Supreme Court of Canada: ISAC intervened in Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, decided in March 2026, a case addressing the section 15 equality rights of refugee claimant women.