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A looming job action by B.C. legal aid lawyers on April 1 could bring the wheels of justice to a halt in Okanagan courthouses and across the province.
Over 600 members of the Association of Legal Aid Lawyers voted last week 97 per cent in favour of job action starting next month in protest of a system starved for funding by successive NDP and Liberal governments.
Legal aid lawyers have received just one raise since 1991, when a 10-per-cent increase in 2006 lifted rates to about $88 an hour.
Penticton lawyer Paul Varga says he and many other criminal defence and family lawyers feel an ethical obligation to do legal-aid work, but have reached a tipping point, losing money on some files at $88 an hour.
“If I continue to fulfill my ethical obligations by continuing to do this work, I’m not actually fulfilling my ethical obligations for future generations because we're not going to have this fixed, it's going to stay broken.”
“At what point do you say enough is enough?” he added, suggesting the system will have a hard time attracting newly graduated and student-loan burdened lawyers if things continue.
The Legal Services Society of B.C. receives roughly $90M a year from the provincial government, about what it received in 2002. Had the province budgeted for inflation and population growth, that figure should be at $146M today, lawyers say.
Varga says it's criminal defence lawyers that defend Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms everyday, “if we don’t defend the Charter in the courtroom, who will?”
But even if you don’t care about ensuring those accused of a crime have access to a lawyer, from a purely economical point of view, Varga says the fewer self-represented participants in the legal system, the better.
“Do you want people to go unrepresented and cost the system more?” he said, suggesting a courtroom costs upwards of $3,000 an hour to run when factoring in sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, clerks and the building itself.
“Unrepresented litigants drag the system down, and that’s what we are going to see in the next while,” he said. “You are going to see things slow down, bog down, there is going to be a crunch.”
On April 1 legal-aid lawyers throughout B.C. will withdraw family and criminal duty counsel services — offering free legal advice at courthouses — for those not in custody. If the dispute drags on, services will be withdrawn from in-custody clients and lawyers stop taking new legal-aid cases and consider dropping existing ones.
Varga says the funding crunch also means fewer and fewer parents are being considered eligible for family legal aid. Right now, the bar is set at income of about $1,500 a month, well below minimum wage.
“So you’re telling me, someone making less than minimum wage… has the financial wherewithal or ability to hire their own private attorney?” Varga asked.
“There are parents that are struggling that just don’t have the finances,” he added. “Who is going to represent those people? Are they somehow deserving of less service than others?”
The Association of Legal Aid Lawyers has tabled a proposal for the provincial government requesting the office of the Attorney General increase its finding back to 1992 per capita levels adjusts for inflation.
In 1992/1993, per capita spending on legal aid was $25.22. If it was indexed to inflation, spending should be about $40 per capital. Instead, it sunk to $15.00 by 2017/2018. That represents a 60 per cent decrease in per capita spending since 1992 when factoring inflation.
The provincial government says talks remain underway with lawyers about the proposal.
