Mr. Chair, I appreciate our colleague's question. As he knows, legal aid is an important issue which is directly linked to the justice system as a whole as well as to access to justice.
As soon as I became Justice Minister, I had the opportunity to discuss this with my colleagues during federal-provincial meetings. As we know, there are some well-known difficulties in the legal aid system in all provinces.
Over the last two years, our main budget for transfers to provinces in terms of legal aid was $82 million. Because of specific requests or demands, we increased our contribution by $20 million over the last two years, therefore increasing the total government contribution to $102 million.
Since legal aid does not come under our jurisdiction, although the Canadian government does play a role in crime-related legal aid, we have agreed with all the provinces, during the discussions we had, to join forces in order to renew the legal aid system, and to share our different ways of doing things and our best practices.
I also told all my colleagues that we would obtain additional budgets to increase our participation in legal aid. As I said earlier tonight, the basic amount for our contribution to legal aid is $82 million. In the last budget, an additional amount of $89 million was provided over a two-year period, increasing our annual contribution to $126.4 million over the next two years.