Educating the public.

By Mayland McKimm, QC

Legal aid is never far from the news and one way the B.C. Branch of the CBA can assist the debate is by educating the public. A good starting point is the “Four Ws” – the Who, What, Where and Why of legal aid.

Let’s start with “Where,” because it has been the subject of some recent confusion and controversy. The confusion surrounds the number of locations where you can apply for legal aid. The answer is “more than 50” – in courthouses, lawyers’ offices and social service agencies. These locations are operated by 31 local agents in communities from Abbotsford to Fort St. John and two regional centres located in Vancouver and Terrace. The province-wide, toll-free call centre also handles about 20 per cent of all applications for legal representation. The controversy relates to the decision to replace five regional centres with seven local agents at the beginning of April. To explain this decision, we have to talk about the “What.”

What services does Legal Services Society (LSS) provide? The society’s statutory mandate is to help people resolve their legal problems. We do this in three different ways. The first is by providing free legal information and self-help materials through legal information outreach workers, our websites and our publications. The society distributed more than 150,000 such publications last year. The second is legal advice through duty counsel and family advice lawyers. Last year, duty counsel provided help more than 100,000 times. The third is representation by a lawyer in court. This is available for financially eligible people facing serious family, criminal, child protection and immigration problems. From April 2008 to March 2009, more than 38,000 clients received representation assistance. To provide more client services, particularly the services of lawyers in court and as duty counsel, LSS made the difficult decision to close five regional centres and channel the monies used to operate those centres directly into services. As Chair of the Legal Services Society, former President of the B.C. Branch and a long-time legal aid lawyer, I know that the loss of the regional centres is not without its consequences, but as a result of closing them we are in a position to restore desperately needed services. For example, LSS has already reintroduced extended funding for particularly difficult family law matters.

The “Who” of legal aid is you – the 900 or so lawyers who take referrals or serve as duty counsel. Some may handle only one case a year; for others, it is the bulk of their work. And there is no need to dwell on the “Why.” It’s why we all went to law school – social justice, helping people resolve their problems and building a civil society.

This overview describes only a few of the many facets of LSS and legal aid. There is no room here to discuss the work of case management lawyers, the tariff accounts department, the intake staff, the public legal education team, the policy analysts, or the many other people who ensure low-income people receive legal aid. Nor is there room to discuss the details of the society’s funding and budgeting. But a clear understanding of each is necessary if there is to be informed public debate. Equally important for public discussion is identifying the services that should form the core of legal aid and the outcomes that can be expected from those services. It will greatly strengthen our continuing efforts to secure improved funding if we have a clear vision of how limited resources should be spent and how we produce measurable social outcomes with public funds. We see the B.C. Branch of the Canadian Bar Association as an important ally in the creation of that vision and want to congratulate you for your continuing and substantial efforts on behalf of our clients.

Mayland McKimm, QC is Chair of The Legal Services Society. www.lss.bc.ca

This article was published in the April 2010 issue of BarTalk. © 2010 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.