Each province is responsible for the development and administration of its own legal aid system and program. Some jurisdictions provide legal aid through the private sector, where individual lawyers can obtain legal aid certificates to represent clients. Other jurisdictions provide it by government, through legal aid clinics, and the lawyers there are essentially civil servants. They work for the government. Some provinces have a dual system in which they have legal aid clinics as well as a private sector certificate system.
So each province is able to develop its own system. Each system, of course, has different cost impacts, and that is another reason the cost of legal aid may be different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Of course, like all things in politics, everything doesn't come down to costs. There are also other reasons as to why a jurisdiction would go with one system over another, and that again is part of the flexibility that exists with the current scheme, and also with the federal government being able to adjust its negotiations based on evaluations of the past record and what's expected in the future.