BarTalk December 2000
Volume 12, Number 6

by Brian Midwinter QC

After a decade of cuts, Canada's legal aid system is in crisis. Over the past few years, the Canadian Bar Association has rigorously attempted to raise awareness among government and the public about the urgency of the legal aid issue.

We have two main messages - Canadians need greater access to justice, and legal aid lawyers need to be treated fairly. The CBA argues for an increased government commitment to legal aid, involving greater resources and more uniformity across the country through national minimum standards and eligibility criteria. One recent initiative was our Advocacy Resource Kit of tools and background information to assist bar leaders in delivering a consistent and effective message about legal aid. Our latest project is the CBA's Legal Aid Watch (L.A.W.), an e-mail network of legal aid and community law reform lawyers in the various settings for legal aid delivery across the country.

Lawyers see what happens when people are cut off or refused by legal aid and the repercussions that limited access to justice can have. Parents without legal advice lose custody of their children or are unable to provide for their children because they cannot access the child support to which they are legally entitled. Refugees are returned to countries where they face almost certain torture, and even death. People with viable defences unwittingly plead guilty, establishing criminal records that will plague them for life. The unrepresented accused and litigants in court impact on many of us, including judges, Crowns, staff lawyers and defence counsel, as well as the justice system as a whole and the people it is intended to serve.

More than expected from any other profession as a voluntary contribution to the public good, lawyers keep legal aid delivery alive and functioning. The profession contributes through government holdbacks, working beyond unreasonable block tariffs, accepting hourly tariffs at a fraction of their normal hourly rates, complying with onerous bureaucratic requirements to be paid at all, taxes imposed on their fees, interest paid on their trust accounts, taking legal aid work though it means a financial loss and all their Pro Bono work.

We created the Legal Aid Watch to publicize what we hear from our members about the impact of inadequate legal aid on Canadians and on themselves as lawyers. Members are asked to email National office once a month with updates on improvements and deterioration to legal aid in their respective regions, and to offer any particularly glaring examples they've come across that demonstrate what inadequate legal aid has actually meant to an individual or individuals. A selected "horror" story is then featured as the basis for a monthly open letter to MPs, MPPs, Legal Aid plans and newspapers, among others.

Some of the specific goals for the Watch include the following:

• to allow the CBA to stay on top of the national legal aid situation by gathering monthly updates from legal aid lawyers across the country;

• to give the CBA the ammunition it needs to regularly remind government leaders that improvements to legal aid are needed NOW;

• to present legal aid clients and their lawyers to the public and to politicians in a more sympathetic and accurate light;

• to focus on governmental responsibility to improve access to justice;

• to raise the profile of legal aid and its importance; and

• to demonstrate the CBA's ongoing commitment to access to justice.

Brian Midwinter QC, National Legal Aid Liaison Committee Chair

For more information or to join the Watch, please contact Gaylene Schellenberg at the CBA National Office, 1.800.267. 8860 ext 139 or email gaylenes@cba.org.

This article was published in the December 2000 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2005, all rights reserved.