Justice committee  What happened is that the money that was received by LSS, our legal services society, was vastly reduced. Their budget was cut dramatically. They had to decide what priority areas to put that remaining money into. They put it where they knew they would be sued right away, and the

Justice committee  That particular woman has now appealed and reapplied, even though she had already applied and appealed and been turned down. She's gone back for one last effort.

Justice committee  It's a surprisingly common story. It's not just one person. I've heard it a lot. Part of the issue is that people are desperately seeking help and they don't know, nor should they have to know, that when they get a letter saying, “You have no further avenue for appeal,” that mayb

Justice committee  I think that might have been alluded to earlier, but there's constitutional support for criminal law legal aid, for access to justice in criminal law, and access to justice in child protection, and in immigration and refugee matters to some extent. I would say that there should b

Justice committee  Thank you for having me back today to speak about legal aid. As you likely know, West Coast LEAF is a legal organization that focuses on the rights of women and girls. We work doing litigation, law reform, and public legal education. We've worked extensively in the area of acces

Justice committee  Thank you for the opportunity to present submissions today. We are both very pleased to be here. West Coast LEAF's mandate is to achieve equality by changing historic patterns of systemic discrimination against women through B.C.-based litigation, law reform, and public legal e

Status of Women committee  It's really a significant point, the lack of funding across the country for civil society that works on human rights issues and more particularly on women's issues. You can see the lack of national women's organizations. There are very few left. That didn't use to be the case. Th

Status of Women committee  We recently produced a report called “Able Mothers: The intersection of parenting, disability and the law”, and I'm happy to send that to the committee. There are some recommendations for the federal government. Throughout this report there are recommendations about providing acc

Status of Women committee  Actually I just wanted to speak to your previous question. You said you wanted to hear from us about whether we thought progress had been made and how we make further change. I want to make two points. One is that I think there has been some progress made in silos. In order to p

Status of Women committee  Absolutely there's a role. I don't want to take sole credit for running an education program. There are other really important education programs run across the country by our sister organization, LEAF national. There's a project actually right now that is being run by the Girls

Status of Women committee  There are so many recommendations on improvements to family law. Most of my recommendations would probably go to the provinces rather than to areas within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

Status of Women committee  I can't think of anything particular on the Divorce Act off the top of my head, but I can say that the federal government could talk about enforcement of the Family Law Act. For B.C. it's the Family Law Act; in other provinces it's called other things. Family law is meaningless

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry, for some reason we're having trouble hearing you. Did you ask whether we were consulted?

Status of Women committee  West Coast LEAF was not.

Status of Women committee  I would like to see a return to the time—it was in the nineties, I believe, and I don't have the date—when the federal government gave funding to provincial legal aid plans through tied transfer payments, transfer payments with strings attached. Basically that is a funding requ