Thank you very much for the invitation.
I accepted your invitation as president of the Association des juristes d'expression française de la Nouvelle-Écosse. We are very honoured to be testifying before you.
I have been practising law for 25 years, and I accept legal aid certificates. Since I live in Cheticamp, on Cape Breton Island, I regularly get client referrals from the offices in Port Hawkesbury, Sydney and Antigonish. With francophone clients, when the local legal aid office has no bilingual employees, I may get certificates from Halifax, New Glasgow, and elsewhere.
My name and telephone number also appear on the list of lawyers who provide Brydges services, when a francophone lawyer is called on to represent an accused who is arrested outside working hours.
In Nova Scotia, legal aid offices can be found around the province and each one is independent from the others. The staff, however, is hired through the main office in Halifax.
For a number of years, I have been accepting many fewer certificates, largely because of the volume of work it requires and the low hourly rates paid by legal aid. For example, the last bill that I sent to legal aid was for 35 hours of work at $80 an hour, the hourly rate paid by legal aid, even though I worked 40 hours more than that.
When I started practising law, I became aware of a situation that still exists and that disappoints me enormously: the number of trials and requests for service in French is directly linked to the number of francophone, francophile or Acadian lawyers practising in Nova Scotia.
With legal aid, the situation is even more critical, because few lawyers who can practice in French are accepting certificates. In addition, few legal aid lawyers are being hired. At the moment, the legal aid service has one francophone lawyer, another will join her in a month, and there’s also one intern, who may be hired.
When we got in touch with the director of the legal aid service in Halifax in order to find out the number of service requests that are received in French, we realized that the office does not compile those kinds of statistics. We find that unfortunate, because it is very important for those of us living in a minority to have those data.
We do not know how many clients are francophone and, among the clients who could potentially be francophone, we do not know how many of them asked for services in French. We do not have statistics on the number of people who would agree to proceed with a case in French.
In Nova Scotia, the policy is to provide certificates for French-language services only for criminal law cases. Even when a request comes from a francophone client, in a family law case, for example, the policy applies. However, I can tell you that, in my region in Cape Breton, I regularly receive certificates for francophones coming to the legal aid office.
Normally, clients are given a list of bilingual lawyers with whom they can communicate. At the Halifax office, I was also told that, if a request came for a criminal case, they would certainly try to find a bilingual lawyer to accept a legal aid certificate. If need be, they would even provide a certificate to someone from outside the province.
I have talked to people in several offices, including the central office in Halifax. I have been told that job application forms always ask if people speak French, especially when they are looking for bilingual lawyers or staff. Bilingualism is an asset, but in Nova Scotia’s legal aid, no position is designated bilingual.
We do very little such recruitment, except through local newspapers. We do not necessarily approach the universities that train bilingual students, such as the Université de Moncton or McGill.
It is also unfortunate that the statistics do not reflect certain francophone clients who might need legal services. For any language other than English, the “other” box is used, which does not yield representative data.
In my opinion, until there is an active offer of legal services in both languages, at the RCMP for instance or in regions with significant demand, people will never be able to choose between French and English or have their trial conducted in French.
Let me share an anecdote in this regard. During my first 15 years of practice, every client who came to see me, even in my own town, said they were afraid that the judge would hold it against them if they asked for their trial to be conducted in French. In the last 10 years, however, that issue has not come up again, either because I have won a few trials, or because people have learned that is not how it works, either based on my reputation or from the experience of people who have been through the justice system.
I have heard, however, that this is still the case in regions where there is no active offer or where there are fewer francophone lawyers. Through my contacts, I have also learned that there are very few bilingual lawyers who accept legal aid certificates. That is why not many services are offered in French, even in other Acadian regions.
As to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I have had at least one case related to this aspect of the law. The person assigned to the file was bilingual. Even though the case was settled out of court, we could have continued in French.
Another one of my clients had dealings with the commission for about ten years. Some people there spoke French, but all meetings with the parties were in English. The lawyers suggested by the commission were anglophones; the briefs were written in English only; the senior management had no French-language skills; and there was no active offer of services, even for court appearances.
In closing, I would like to point out that our association opened the Bilingual Legal Information Centre, where people can get information. I do not have the exact figures, but I think about 20% of people request services in French.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to reach clients who need services in rural regions, such as Cape Breton or southwestern Nova Scotia. The majority of requests for services in French are from the community in Halifax, and they are from immigrants or people originally from other provinces, particularly Quebec and New Brunswick. There are fewer requests for information from people from other Acadian regions.
Thank you very much. I will be pleased to answer your questions.