Patterns in Legal Aid - (Second Edition)
The Government of Canada maintains a national cost-shared legal aid program
through a series of agreements with the provincial and territorial governments.
The program provides legal representation to:
- indigent adults accused of committing criminal offenses;
- juveniles charged under the provisions of the Young Offender's Act;
- welfare recipients faced with a variety of civil legal problems; and,
- refugees through provisions in the Immigration Act.
This report focuses on legal aid provided to the first two of these populations.
Under the terms of the criminal legal aid agreements, Canada and the provinces
conduct periodic evaluations of the legal aid programs. To date, evaluations
have been conducted in six provinces.
This report summarizes the principal findings accumulated through the six
evaluation reports and a number of smaller studies, and analyses national data
sets provided by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) and the
Department of Justice.
Findings are organized around five sets of issues of federal interest:
- Federal Visibility
- No significant problems with federal visibility currently appear to exist.
- Accessibility
- Wide intra- and interjurisdictional variations in the proportion of criminal
charges covered by legal aid and in the approved legal aid application rate
that cannot be explained by variation in crime or poverty indicators point
to a lack of uniform and equitable access to legal aid across Canada.
- Eligibility
- Evidence from the evaluations suggests that legal aid eligibility criteria
adopted in the provinces and territories tend to be somewhat inflexible and
inflexibly applied.
- Effectiveness and Impact
- Client satisfaction surveys show very high levels of satisfaction with
legal aid services across Canada.
- Surveys of judges and lawyers show general satisfaction with the quality
of legal aid services.
- Outcome studies show no difference in the proportion of guilty outcomes
experienced by clients of legal aid staff lawyers and private counsel handling
cases on referral. Staff clients, however, are sentenced to jail less often
than private bar referral clients. These findings hold even when type of
case and client are controlled.
- Lawyer activity studies show that private lawyers handling cases on referral
invest substantially more time per case than do legal aid staff lawyers
and that staff lawyers tend to plead clients guilty earlier and more often
than do private lawyers.
- Cost
- The evaluation studies and the national data sets show wide variation
in the cost of legal aid from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across Canada.
- Both intrajurisdictional studies and interjurisdictional data show a cost
advantage to the staff mode of legal aid delivery over the private bar referral
mode of delivery.
- Examination of current patterns of expenditure and payment to lawyers
reveals that there is substantial variation from one jurisdiction
to another in the compensation of lawyers doing essentially similar legal
aid work. This variation appears to relate to the mode of delivery.
Two recommendations are advanced:
- Future legal aid evaluations should focus on cross-jurisdictional issues
and federal interests.
- The current cost-sharing formula should be modified to provide incentives
to increase the equity and the cost-efficiency of the legal aid system
across Canada.
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