Thank you for the question.
Yes, we can speak to it, and the minister will speak more to it, because it's not reflected in the supplementary estimates but will be reflected in the main estimates.
The federal government supports especially criminal legal aid through transfers to provinces. Those transfers have not decreased for many years; it's also true that they haven't increased for many years. Those transfers are a kind of core transfer for criminal legal aid, an additional transfer in respect of some public safety and anti-terrorism matters involving legal aid, and an additional transfer in respect of immigration and refugee matters where legal aid is required. There's about $108 million, or $112 million, I guess, in fairness, that's transferred to provinces and territories in respect of core criminal legal aid.
Civil legal aid, especially for matters involving family law, is transferred through the Canada social transfer, the bulk transfer that goes to provinces. Those transfers have increased by virtue of an escalator that is built into that transfer year over year.
Having said that, this system has faced, and provinces and territories have faced, an ongoing set of challenges. We've worked actively to address criminal legal aid through some efficiency measures by trying to find ways of ensuring that there's not needless delay in bringing cases to trial. We continue to work on that. We also work on family justice by trying to support people in finding ways to address their issues other than going back to court.
We've also been involved in the major studies. We provided important support to the study on access to justice in civil and family law that was spearheaded by the Chief Justice and particularly led by Justice Cromwell of the Supreme Court of Canada. We were actively and deeply involved in that, and we continue to be involved with provinces and territories in trying to find ways of achieving more efficiencies and effectiveness in the system to ensure the widest access to justice.
Then there's the last thing you mentioned, the administrative tribunals support service. That's a story about the ways in which administrative justice can become more effective, in part by consolidating back offices to allow them to take advantage of technology in ways that small tribunals and agencies would never be able to do if they were left on their own. The effort to consolidate administrative services to allow them to share technology, hearing rooms, and otherwise was an effort to look at ways within the existing resource envelope of providing more people more access to more justice more often.