A 40 per cent pay raise for legal aid lawyers is being applauded for improving access to justice for the province's poor. But the hike is clearly not the silver bullet for a legal system that suffers from a lack of lawyers in northern and rural communities and a serious backlog in the courts.
Evan Roitenberg, president of the Criminal Defence Lawyers' Association of Manitoba, said he's optimistic the higher wage will increase the number of lawyers willing to take legal aid work outside the Perimeter Highway.
He hopes that will reduce the time it takes for many criminal and family law matters to get to court, a situation that hurts both plaintiffs and defendants.
For example, he said it can be hard on victims of crime to have to wait months and months for justice to be served. People accused of crimes aren't getting all the help they need either. Roitenberg said those who spend significant amounts of time in custody before going to court are often released for time served, as each day in remand counts for two in jail. All too often, they begin the cycle all over again, he said.
"You're depriving them of access to certain rehabilitation programs that would help them post-sentence," he said.
As reported in the Free Press yesterday, Legal Aid Manitoba is raising the hourly wage it pays to private-bar lawyers from $57 to $80.
Allan Fineblit, CEO of the Law Society of Manitoba, said no matter how many lawyers sign up for legal aid work, it won't be nearly enough to address the chronic shortage of lawyers in the North.
"I don't think anyone should expect the increase in the legal aid tariff to solve the problem. It will certainly be a positive step and be helpful, but I don't think it in and of itself is the solution," he said.
Fineblit will get no argument from Malcolm McDonald, a partner at the Thompson law firm McDonald Huberdeau.
He said the consequences of the lawyer shortage include delayed proceedings while one or both parties search for a lawyer in another community, higher expenses and an increasing number of people who decide to represent themselves.
"You're at a disadvantage if the other party has a lawyer, because you'll be unfamiliar with the procedure, you'll have to draft your own documents. It's like trying to perform surgery on yourself," he said.
McDonald said northern practitioners are already maxed out and the quality of their work would suffer if they overextended themselves further.
"If you try to take on too much, you don't do well for anybody. You have to say, 'no.' Then you have folks going around without lawyers," he said.
The inability to find a lawyer can also affect the likelihood that one's case will be successful, McDonald said. For example, if a spouse is looking to gain custody of their children but can't hire a lawyer, the case could be prejudiced against them.
"A court will take into account the status quo. If one parent has primary care of the children for a period of time, (the court) will be reluctant to interfere with that," he said.
Paul Walsh, a partner at Walsh Company in Winnipeg, said no matter how many lawyers the legal aid tariff hike attracts, the court system doesn't have anywhere near the number of judges, clerks and staff to handle the crush of cases in the queue.
"The courts don't the dates (available). They have no control over the demand for service. It's a supply and demand problem. The number of people facing the court system is larger than ever before," he said.
"The biggest problem in Winnipeg is poverty, and that's producing exceptionally high murder rates and other crimes. The sheer numbers are enormous. The infrastructure isn't there to handle the caseload."
geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca
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