Thank you.
I want to thank the committee for inviting me. It's very much a privilege.
I'm going to begin my remarks by highlighting the results of some research on the prevalence of legal problems experienced by the public. It's a body of research that has had considerable influence on the thinking about access to justice around the world. Then I'm going to try to highlight a few examples of responses from the legal aid world to the results of this research.
The entire body of research now consists of 25 studies that have been done all around the world. Four of these were in Canada, the first in 2004. The most recent is called “Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada”, which is a national survey that was conducted in 2014 by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice. I'll briefly show you a few results from that survey.
We found that almost half, 48.4%, of adult Canadians experience one or more of what we call “everyday legal problems” within a three-year period. If you apply the weights and gross that up to the whole population, that's about 11 million people in a three-year period. Since people often experience more than one problem, that's 35 million problems. These are strikingly large numbers.
This is a percentage of people experiencing one or more problems, by problem type. You can see that consumer debt and employment are the major ones. This pattern is consistent with every survey that's been done around the world, in dozens of different countries.
I said there have been four national surveys in Canada—in 2004, in 2006, in 2008, and most recently in 2014. They've all come in with the same results. If you look at the 25 surveys around the world that I talked about, one of the remarkable things about the body of research is that they've produced very, very consistent results.
I want to emphasize that these are not problems that are resolved in the courts or by lawyers. The basic definition of the kind of legal problem these surveys deal with is any problem that is experienced by the public, whether or not that individual recognizes the legal nature of the problem, and whether or not they use any part of the formal justice system to resolve that problem. The vast majority of people have problems of all kinds, the normal transactions and transitions of everyday life, such as gaining employment, losing employment, contracting, and buying and selling all kinds of things. This is what I've called, in previous work, the legal problems of everyday life.
There are a couple of other interesting bits from the survey. We found that 67% of people experiencing these everyday legal problems did not understand the legal implications of the problem. I don't mean just a little bit; they had no clue. They said they did not understand at all. That's really interesting. It's kind of a striking result in the sense that you have such large numbers of people experiencing problems that they consider to be serious and difficult to resolve, and they have no idea of the legal implications of the problems they're facing.
Only about 7% of the people in this sample and in samples like it use the formal justice system to resolve their problems. Sixty per cent were self-helpers. That means they didn't access legal advice. They didn't access any kind of authoritative non-legal advice. They just tried it on their own.
Experiencing these problems comes at a cost. It costs individuals in terms of money, and it costs individuals in terms of intangible costs such as ill health and stress-related illness. It costs the state in terms of social services, employment insurance, health care costs, a whole range of things, when people have to rely on the social safety net as a direct consequence of the everyday legal problems they experience.
I'm going to leave a couple of reports for the committee. I'll give them to one of your associates at the end. There are more detailed results on this on the website of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice.
This is not new. It's relatively new. It's an approach to understanding the legal problems experienced by the public that have resulted in a considerable shift in thinking over the years about access to justice and how to provide assistance to people experiencing this much larger number of legal problems.
I'll give you a couple of examples of the way that legal aid systems in Canada are responding to this. Generally, with digital delivery of services, one legal aid plan in British Columbia has developed an online dispute resolution problem-solving website to try to reach this much larger number of people. It's called MyLawBC, and has been developed by the Legal Services Society of British Columbia. It's a response to this issue of hidden problems and is trying to develop the capacity for outreach, if you like.
In my own research I'm working with several community legal clinics in southwestern Ontario that are partnering with community groups. The community groups are given the tools to help people identify legal problems, and the relationship between the community group and the legal clinic is like a pathway, then, for people to seek and find legal help.
A second thing that we're doing, just to give you an example of some of the innovations that are flowing out of this research, is called secondary legal consultation, where the lawyer in a legal clinic assists a service provider in a service agency to help their own clients. You'd have something like a case worker in the Canadian Mental Health Association who's trying to guide a client through an application for disability. The way that legal aid can try to reach out and serve more people, and do it relatively inexpensively, is to assist other service providers. We're working on an approach to that.
There are a lot more examples, but all I want to say, quickly, is that there's a huge amount of innovation occurring in some corners of legal aid in Canada. It's really interesting, and it's attempting to address the broad problems that have come out of the research I was describing.
I'm going to leave you with two ideas that occurred to me when I was writing out these notes. The first one is with respect to the body of research on legal problems. Think of access to justice as more than access to the courts, because there's an enormous world of unmet legal need out there that goes way beyond that.
The second thing is what this means for legal aid. Think of legal aid as more than just a transactional system that links lawyers with people appearing in courts but who can't afford to pay the costs of private legal fees. It's a policy instrument. Legal aid is a policy instrument to address access to justice issues, and there's an enormous amount of capacity for creative, innovative work in legal aid that ought to be supported.
I thank you very much for the opportunity.