Second, we must standardize legal aid access for refugee claimants across Canada.
Access to justice should not depend on the province of arrival. Yet legal aid coverage, compensation models and the availability of mandated lawyers vary widely.
In Quebec, fragmented fee structures deter lawyers from taking legal aid files.
In Ontario, hourly compensation has proven to be a success. The result is predictable: claimants are overcharged, misadvised or exploited by bad actors—and governments pay later through increased appeals, judicial reviews and abandoned claims.
A federal-provincial cost-shared envelope, paired with standardized compensation models, would improve representation, reduce downstream costs and support Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada's, or IRCC's, priorities, such as francophone and rural mobility.