It's certainly true that we receive a lot of benefit from lawyers who are doing legal aid work, partly out of the desire to serve the community, and I certainly want to acknowledge that.
Over the past five years the range of matters for which a criminal certificate will be issued has been restricted very significantly in order to try to accommodate increasing demand and increasing costs. Where it used to be that a certificate would be issued if the client were facing either the likelihood of incarceration or the loss of means of employment, in order to operate within our funding limits and within the budget we have had to restrict coverage to those cases in which there is now seen to be a probability of incarceration.
One of the kinds of matters that is putting a lot of pressure on legal aid is a new tendency of the justice authorities to prosecute large groups and large gangs of offenders. Trials involving multiple accused are significantly more expensive—these are essentially the gang-related prosecutions—vastly more expensive than the normal individual cases.
The average case cost for an individual charged with a criminal offence on a certificate is between $1,500 and $1,600. Some of the most expensive of the gang prosecutions are now costing Legal Aid Ontario as much as $90,000 to defend, and this is creating enormous pressure.
A lot of it is in response to the federal amendments to the Criminal Code that provide for specific sections and penalties for gang membership.