Justice committee  Statistically, Ontario receives the majority of refugee claimants in the country.

Justice committee  Therefore, they are the behemoth plan, essentially.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Provinces and territories are able to access the immigration and refugee legal aid funding upon giving notice to us. They will then share in the pot. That funding is up for renewal next fiscal year, so depending on the level of funding, more provinces may decide to join into the

Justice committee  We are setting aside $2 million of federal funding for the next five years for legal aid innovations. That was very much a focus of the legal aid study that was done recently, which Mr. Piragoff referred to. Legal aid plans are very concerned about this, as you can appreciate, an

Justice committee  It's a $13.3-billion transfer.

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.

Justice committee  You've touched on a very important discussion here. This is a discussion that we had for several days in Vancouver last week actually, and that is the outcomes discussion. What are the best indicators of whether legal aid is meeting its goals of providing access to justice to the

Justice committee  There is no amount that is set aside for legal aid. The nature of the Canada social transfer is such that it is block funding for a series of social services that are provided. It is up to the jurisdictions to define how much they set aside for civil legal aid.

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  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  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.