Evidence of meeting #27 for Justice and Human Rights in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was courts.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
No, it's over three years.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Oh, okay. It's over three years. That's just for Ontario, though?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
It's just for Ontario.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
You must know your colleagues in the other provinces. Is there any legal aid plan that you would say is in great shape across this country?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
Oh, no. We're all very challenged--very challenged.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
There has been no increase since 1999.
The Legal Aid Ontario people have been in to see me over the summer, and I think this is a huge need. Can you comment on what happens to the costs in the court system and how efficiently the court does or does not work when you have unrepresented accused before the court?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
I can speak based on my own experience, because I was a courtroom lawyer for thirteen years before I went to work at Legal Aid Ontario. Although the evidence is anecdotal, it's universally agreed that unrepresented parties in the courts make the courts much less efficient. It imposes a real extra duty on the judge to try to make sure the party understands what is going on in the courtroom. The judges often feel in some ways that they have to wade into the conflict in order to make sure the process is fair. It certainly makes proceedings much longer.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Is there any tracking when someone is turned down for legal aid? Do we know whether they then enter guilty pleas more often, or do they just stand up there and do an unrepresented trial?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
We know that there has been some federal research into this. The Department of Justice conducted some research on what happened to unrepresented parties in the system, and they found that to a very significant degree they do in fact just plead guilty.
On the civil side, we did a very tiny project in Legal Aid Ontario in Toronto with family law applicants who were refused. We found that they just abandoned their claim and didn't pursue it any further.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Is there any difference on those stats with an aboriginal population or a first nations population? Did they break that down?
October 31st, 2006 / 4:05 p.m.
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
I don't remember seeing anything that separates out the aboriginal clients in that regard.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
Okay.
Again, what's the percentage of the contribution from the feds in Ontario right now?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
Of the total budget, it's about 16%. The total amount of federal money going to Legal Aid Ontario is about $50 million or $51 million per year.
Liberal
Sue Barnes Liberal London West, ON
I know that percentage varies with other provinces. Do you know how much it varies? Could you give other...?
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
It varies a lot, depending on the.... I think the highest percentage is New Brunswick, which I think may be as high as 60%, but it's dramatically lower than that in all the other provinces.
Liberal
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
The federal government pays the whole cost in the territories.
Conservative
Conservative
Rick Norlock Conservative Northumberland—Quinte West, ON
For the interest of a Canadian who may want to look at these proceedings to get a better picture of how Canada stands with regard to people who are represented or not represented by legal aid, could you go through the evolution of legal aid in Canada, and in Ontario in particular?
From a participatory standpoint, I'm aware of its progress since 1970, and I am proud that we are more and more able to represent people who have less ability to represent themselves.
I'm just wondering if you could give us a brief overview so that anyone who is accessing these hearings could have a picture of the progress we've made since just before we even had anything called legal aid.
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
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.
The plans at first grew quite slowly. Initially in Ontario, for example, we didn't provide much coverage in family matters. As the federal Divorce Act of 1968 kicked in, family law became a very significant--shall we say, growth--industry. There came to be a real demand and a real need for assistance to people involved in family breakdown, and Legal Aid Ontario responded to that by gradually expanding its coverage.
The plan has always struggled with funding. It has always struggled to meet the very significant needs expressed by the numbers of people showing up in the courts wanting help from duty counsel and showing up at the offices seeking assistance. Generally speaking, Legal Aid Ontario has been able to meet a significant part of the need.
We ran into a crisis on the certificate and duty counsel side in the early 1990s. There was a significant recession throughout the country in the early 1990s, and as unemployment doubled, for example, the number of applicants really doubled. We reached a peak in 1993-94, when about 236,000 certificates were issued by Legal Aid Ontario. This triggered a funding crisis that was followed by a political crisis and a change in the management of Legal Aid Ontario.
At the same time, the clinic system was building very slowly. Here my friend René will have to tell me, but my knowledge is that the first clinic was a joint project of the law society and of the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. It was in Parkdale, a poor downtown district of Toronto. It was established in 1972.
Then there were three or four other clinics established, and there were two royal commissions on the clinic system, one led by Justice Sam Grange and the other led by Justice John Osler. Notably, Ian Scott was counsel for the Osler inquiry, and some of you may know that he died two weeks ago.
Their recommendation resulted in the establishment of a significant clinic system in Ontario to provide services of the kind that the law profession had basically not provided before to anybody--services in respect of welfare entitlement, public housing entitlement, pension plan benefits, and unemployment insurance, as it was then.
The clinic system grew gradually, basically through a process whereby local community groups would band together and decide that they should have a clinic, and then they would make application. There were about 60 clinics in the system until 1999. There were 14 counties in the province that did not have any clinic services available at all, so in 1999-2000 there was a further expansion, in which clinics were set up so that there were services available throughout the province.
Conservative
Conservative
Rick Norlock Conservative Northumberland—Quinte West, ON
My experience commenced in the seventies, just after we actually began to have legal aid. I can recall where the courts would simply send the accused out and say they had a two- or three-week or sometimes six-week adjournment in order to obtain legal aid. The system has progressed, and we actually have duty counsel in the courts. And tell me if I'm wrong here, but most judges will not even hear a guilty plea and in some cases won't allow the court to address the case, other than the actual remand, until such time as the person has spoken to legal aid or to duty counsel.
Would you agree with me that we have had, through the courts, significant progress in the availability of representations in the court for persons? As a matter of fact, we've seen a gradual move toward ensuring that anyone who appears before a judge has at least the availability of duty counsel to advise them as to a plea or the next step they need to take in the system.
Vice-President, Policy, Planning and External Relations, Legal Aid Ontario
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.
The difficulty is that duty counsel can't represent people at trials, so if you are in that group of people who are financially eligible, facing a fairly serious charge, and might lose your employment, for example, you're no longer eligible for a certificate and all we can do is offer you help with a guilty plea. But if you're innocent, we can't offer you help, and that is a significant gap in our services in Ontario.
