With respect to criminal legal aid, as you've indicated, the statistics indicate that most accused persons are male as opposed to female. The Supreme Court has held that there is a constitutional right of an unrepresented indigent person to a fair trial. Their fair trial rights may be infringed if the charge is serious, involving complex legal issues, and there's a likelihood of incarceration upon conviction. Those rights are founded on sections 7 and11, as I indicated earlier.
Clearly, in the criminal law context, there are constitutional rights that the state has to serve and respect. Irrespective of who the accused is, whatever gender, whatever nationality, whatever colour, there's a constitutional right that has to be addressed.
On the civil side, however, most civil disputes are disputes between two individual private parties, and the state is not involved. The state may become involved for policy reasons in order to assist individuals. For example, in family law, as you look at the chart, and I can't remember which slide it was, but for civil legal aid, a significant proportion of civil legal aid at the provincial level goes to family law. That's a policy decision by governments to say that even though family law disputes are between two private litigants, there are a number of public policy interests involved, particularly children. The state has a public parens patriae interest in the welfare of children. Therefore, they will provide more civil legal aid funding to family law matters, as opposed to other civil disputes.
In those situations, clearly in civil law, family law, there's generally going to be, in most cases, gender equilibrium, although not necessarily, given modern Canadian families do not have to be heterosexual anymore. Some of the gender imbalance is because of who the litigants are and the composition of the litigants, and also who is appearing before the courts.