Justice committee  No.

Justice committee  We've been grappling with some interesting issues around gender identity in terms of the Rise Women's Legal Centre that we opened. Obviously it has the word “women” in the title, and the way we approached that, from the very beginning, was to define women as self-defined. That st

Justice committee  It's mostly Rise Women's Legal Centre that they will be walking through the doors of. That's a separate organization, but it's one that we're intimately involved in. The students are all receiving training from a lawyer in the community who's very active on trans rights and who a

Justice committee  I don't have those. Rise clinic is gathering that information in all their intake forms, but I don't have that at my fingertips. We are doing outreach to the indigenous community. There's a community advisory council that directs the work of the clinic, and there's strong indigen

Justice committee  We haven't, but some of that work is happening in B.C. There isn't a really strong legal organization representing those interests. Certainly we do, but we also recognize that we have some limitations in where we're coming from. There are couple of lawyers in the community who ar

Justice committee  There are clinical services that are directed at indigenous communities. There's the indigenous legal centre in Vancouver. Going back to the earlier question, that is another partnership with UBC. In fact it's not just a partnership; it is a UBC law clinic, whereas ours is not. T

Justice committee  I would like to see earmarked funds go to family law and legal aid in the provinces. There is precedent for that with the transfer that was made on criminal legal aid. It can be done. I do think there is a role for the federal government in it. I think there was a case you referr

Justice committee  The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives just put out an interesting report about the best place in Canada to be a woman. I can't remember where the best and the worst were, but B.C. is low in terms of spending on legal aid. It's very low in particular on family law. There is

Justice committee  Oh, yes. There is a push for mediation services in B.C. I think it's one we need to view with caution, from the access to justice perspective, because it can be seen as the solution to everything. Where there's violence and when there are power dynamics in a relationship, I don'

Justice committee  Sure. Pro bono is really important. I don't want to undermine that. It's really important in terms of the spirit of the bar in meeting the needs of justice. In B.C., pro bono work is administered primarily through an organization called Access Pro Bono, which really struggles to

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Absolutely. It's a very common experience and it's called litigation harassment. There is a lawyer on the other side, or potentially an abuser on the other side, who just runs out the resources. They bring all kinds of applications, everything they can think of to throw at the wa

Justice committee  It's a huge problem. I don't have the exact statistics, but I think in the court of appeal over 50% of family litigants are self-represented. It's a significant problem for the court. It causes huge delays, and there are hard costs associated with those delays for everybody invol

Justice committee  That's right, because her legal aid representation primarily covers her protection order. It only covers people where there's violence, and then it only covers enough hours to get the protection order. So when she's fighting over custody, she's generally doing that on her own.

Justice committee  To address the law school point first, I think there is an interesting and growing movement around clinical education and what that means for access to justice in the country. In B.C. in particular, as I said, we started the Rise Women's Legal Centre, in partnership with UBC Law.