Justice committee  They generally tend to arrive penniless, and the consequences for them in these hearings are very significant. It's an ongoing debate about priorities for legal aid, and well-meaning and intelligent people can disagree about those priorities. In Ontario, we've had fairly stable percentages of the program devoted to family and criminal and refugee over the past decade.

Justice committee  I think we spend about $175 million on certificates, of which about $90 million is criminal. On family, we spend about $50 million. For refugees, it's about $13 million to $14 million. And then there's still a residue of some other civil legal aid, particularly Consent and Capacity Board matters for people who are suffering from issues related to their mental health status.

Justice committee  It's about 12% of the budget for the duty counsel program as a whole. The services are provided by about 2,000 per diem lawyers in the province. The program is anchored by about 100 or 110 full-time duty counsel, most of whom we call supervisory duty counsel, who work as the lead hands to coordinate the per diem part of the service.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I'm most familiar with the English legal aid plan. Although Ontario has a relatively large and well-funded plan when compared to other Canadian provinces, we are nothing like the English plan. The English plan is the grandmother of all plans. We all look to it with admiration.

Justice committee  I can only speak for Ontario. You certainly have identified a problem that has been identified in Ontario as a significant problem. We have had in Ontario, for about the last fifteen years, a government program now called the Family Responsibility Office. It's a department of I think the Ministry of Community and Social Services, and it seeks to enforce support and custody orders.

Justice committee  Because of the existence of this other provincial agency in Ontario, it wouldn't be a high priority for Legal Aid Ontario.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  That's correct, and the duty counsel program has been strengthened significantly over the last few years in Ontario. We've put resources into it, and we have actually required it to look after more people because we haven't been able to give them certificates. We've been restricting the coverage for certificates.

Justice committee  No, I don't have any statistics on that. There are certainly people who use legal aid more than once. Generally speaking, if they're people who are facing charges and have previously faced charges, they're likely at a significantly increased risk of incarceration as a penalty. Therefore, they are significantly more likely to receive legal aid and, in the view of many people, significantly more in need of legal aid.

Justice committee  No, there is a cap on the number of hours a lawyer can bill Legal Aid Ontario. I think it's 2,700 or 2,750. At the highest rate, that works out to be just above $200,000. There are perhaps a dozen lawyers who do that well, who get up to that cap in Ontario. You have to remember that is a gross figure, though, because they have to pay for all the costs of operating their offices, their secretaries, their accountants, and support staff out of that.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  If I could just correct your question—or perhaps my answer wasn't sufficiently clear—what I said was that some of the lawyers who do the work regard it as charity work. There are many lawyers who are quite dependent on the legal aid program. We don't know and can't track in Legal Aid Ontario what the average net income of a legal aid lawyer is, but we hear anecdotally that there are a lot of lawyers who are really netting between $40,000 to $60,000 a year from full-time legal aid practices.

Justice committee  I don't think so. In Ontario, you have a legal profession of 30,000 lawyers, of whom about 22,000 are in practice. Of those, I don't know what the number is, but most lawyers never go to court. What we do in Legal Aid Ontario, of course, is fund lawyers in courts. So we're getting services from only a small fraction of the practice as a whole.

Justice committee  Legal Aid Ontario was one of the earliest full-scale legal aid plans in the country. It was established by legislation passed in 1967; the other provinces passed legislation in the succeeding decade. I'm sorry that I can't tell you with any degree of accuracy how swiftly the other provinces joined in; I think Quebec, in particular, was early into the game with a comprehensive coverage system.