Thank you.

Thank you to all the witnesses.

I was once a legal aid lawyer, along with my colleague and I think probably Senator Jaffer as well. Mr. Field, my question is to you. You talked about the disproportionate effect this bill will have on legal aid clients and legal aid systems, and you also noted that recent moves to add funding for police and prosecutors will exacerbate that situation. I know that it’s costs shared across the country, but could you give us an idea of what the trend has been for legal aid funding from the federal government in Canada? We heard some comments from the minister that there had been an increase in legal aid funding in recent years, but if we’re going to be making observations about the burden on legal aid, it would be helpful to have some concrete information on those trends.

The minister is correct in that there has been additional investments in legal aid, but if you look at how it’s structured, it’s year-to-year, it’s in-year. We have met with the representatives of the Department of Justice as an association a number of times and said we can’t really plan. They have announced a number of times in the budget that it’s a one-time funding, so that doesn’t really help us in terms of long-term planning.

I was just looking at the base funding that legal aid gets from the federal government, and we get $100 million from the federal government, $58 million of which is base funding and the rest one-time funding, depending on the circumstances. Every year we have to go cap in hand to the federal government saying, “We’re short of money. We need you to assist us.”

I think the other plans are much more precarious than Legal Aid Ontario. We have a bigger base. The province provides us with a significant amount of money, but some of the other plans are much more dependent on federal funding than we are. That’s a serious problem for many of the plans across the country, because how do you plan when from year to year you don’t know exactly what the federal government is going to invest in legal aid? How do we make changes to the hourly rate we pay lawyers? We can’t next year reverse and say, “Sorry, we’re not going to pay you as much as we did last year.” Those are the kinds of planning challenges that this represents.

Could you provide the details you mentioned to the committee through the clerk, please?

We can certainly provide the information. Our financial statements have this information available, but I can provide that.

I mean for the whole country, if you have that through the association, please.

Thank you to all of you for appearing.

I was going to ask you some of the ways which your various organizations are advocating for the sorts of interventions that you all indicated you support, but first, Professor Yule, you’ve talked about and written about wrongful convictions and talked about the ways in which the routine operations of the current system tend to disproportionately impact women and those who are victims, so I’m curious. I know that you’ve done work in the prisons and have interviewed folks around this issue. I’m wondering if you can elaborate on that.

Thank you very much for the question.

My work with women in custody didn’t focus so much on wrongful conviction. That was prior work focusing on their experiences of victimization offending.

Having said that, the link between wrongful conviction, which has been discussed on the panel today, with Bill C-48 is very concerning and something we must take seriously because if individuals are faced with increased barriers to being able to achieve bail, there is certainly a greater likelihood that they may decide it’s in their best interest to enter a false guilty plea for something that they didn’t do to avoid spending long periods of time in remand. The very negative detrimental consequences of remand have already been discussed yesterday and today, so I won’t elaborate on those. There is real concern that we will see increase in wrongful conviction and false guilty pleas, miscarriages of justice more generally, if we contribute to an overburdened system by making it more and more difficult for people to achieve bail with the expansion of the reverse onus provision.

In addition to what I just asked, in terms of legal aid, I’m particularly concerned that one of the issues raised is that this will privilege those with resources. You have already mentioned some of the impacts it will have on legal aid systems and duty counsel. I’m interested in whether any of you, or all of you, want to comment on how this will become the purview of those with the greatest resources to put up defences.

That is the concern that we have as these greater demands come to our duty counsel as a result of this bill and as a result of the expanded reverse onus. How do we meet those demands? How do we provide those kinds of services without taking away from other services? Some of the difficulties currently that people without resources who are dependent on legal aid have to obtain bail have already been mentioned: access to sureties, access to housing. With the reverse onus, those are increased.

One aspect I want to mention about the importance of duty counsel work with respect to this bill is that it is needed because it actually helps address the risk of this bill. It actually in some ways supports the government’s goals to ensure that it will be focused on violent offenders. It won’t pick up people who have an assault with a weapon conviction for using a relatively innocuous object. It won’t pick up and criminalize women who have received discharge for an intimate partner violence. That’s the work the duty counsel, bringing that to the attention of Crowns and judges, and we’ll be challenged to continue that work.

In my opinion, legal aid has always been under-resourced and undervalued. I see from my own experience that legal aid counsel seems to be — this is a generalization — fairly stressed out with the incredible professional responsibilities they have. That’s not an exaggeration of any type. What confidence do you have that the federal, provincial or territorial governments will deliver the types of resources required for legal aid to provide equitable legal representation to their clients?

That’s a tough one. I would say that this will always be an ongoing issue. Legal aid is not a popular thing, so governments cannot announce that they are spending money on legal aid and receive a lot of public support for that. That’s an ongoing problem. It will always be a challenge. There will always be pressure, or trying to pressure, governments to provide the resources that we need in order to do our jobs. There are constitutional issues that are affected by that. Our representation for clients and having people who are wrongfully convicted is certainly something that no government wants to see. It’s going to be an ongoing issue.

[Translation]

Thank you. I’m sincerely grateful to our witnesses for their illuminating testimony. Thanks to you as well, colleagues. One of the committee chair’s responsibilities is to keep us to our allotted time. Thanks to your discipline, we’re adjourning the meeting on time. I wish you all a good weekend. We’ll see each other again in two weeks.

(The committee adjourned.)