Justice committee  I would second what Mr. Piragoff has said. Each province determines its own eligibility guidelines. The guidelines always take into account income. They always take into account the capacity of the person to pay and the scope of coverage provided by the legal aid plans. As you'

Justice committee  We are right now in the midst of negotiating a new distribution formula for criminal legal aid. The old criminal legal aid distribution formula was based largely on historical factors and we largely distributed many of the monies based on the past contributions of various jurisdi

Justice committee  Yes, there is a variance in the acceptance rate. We don't have the exact percentages but we could certainly provide that. It also depends on each province's eligibility criteria, of course.

Justice committee  We do not get into that level of detail in our discussions. It is entirely possible.

Justice committee  I think you should also note that over the course of the next five-year contribution agreement, the federal contribution to criminal legal aid will be increasing. It had been at $112 million for a certain period of time. This year it increased by $9 million. Next year, it's incre

Justice committee  No, they don't.

Justice committee  We're having policy discussions with the provinces and territories about the innovations they can take to maximize how the money that is allocated to these legal aid plans can have the maximum impact. In terms of what various jurisdictions choose to spend, that is a matter of the

Justice committee  There are in fact forms of assistance that they may be able to obtain. Generally, duty counsel services are provided to anyone who arrives at a court without representation. You do not need to go through a legal aid application process to obtain duty counsel services. Some jurisd

Justice committee  Yes, in fact, they have.

Justice committee  Performance measurement is a complex topic, and we're looking at various sorts of indicators that could help us track the accessibility and adequacy of criminal legal aid over time. We don't have a specific answer, but we are developing a much more robust performance measurement

Justice committee  Yes, we have. In fact, in our federal-provincial-territorial discussions, we are focusing very much on performance measurement. We've just concluded a week's worth of meetings in Vancouver, most of which focused on precisely these topics, and benchmarks is an issue that came up.

Justice committee  Some legal aid plans have been able to increase the tariffs that they pay to lawyers because there have been additional investments both by the federal government and by several jurisdictions.

Justice committee  It depends what you mean by “better service”. Again, it is all part of outcomes measurement. We are working on that, and I believe Statistics Canada, the Canadian centre for justice statistics is a part of that effort.

Justice committee  If I may add, in terms of the demographics, while we do not collect that information through the legal aid survey through Statistics Canada, we do collect some basic demographic information through our final claims forms for our contribution agreement. We do have information on a

Justice committee  The legal aid plans themselves track it. This is not something that we track. We provide contributions to provinces and territories for access to legal aid services.