Starting next week Legal Aid will be more difficult to obtain as the program lowers its financial guidelines to save money.
The new financial cut-offs will be 30 per cent lower than present. Legal Aid estimates the new funding model will cut 6,100 people off from legal assistance.
Legal Aid decides whether or not to cover applicants based on a number of factors including the type of crime someone is charged with and the risk they face if they are convicted, but there are also financial standards.
The financial eligibility guidelines are based on the size of a person’s family and income.
Under the existing guidelines, a single person can have a net income of $21,000 and still qualify, but that amount will be reduced to $14,700.
A person with three members in their family could make $37,000 under the old rules, but only $25,900 under the new guidelines.
Jackie Schaffter, CEO of Legal Aid said the society was eager not to change its financial guidelines, but faced with a major funding challenge they had no other choice.
“The decision to reduce the financial eligibility guidelines was the absolute last issue the board came to in trying to meet our resource issue.”
The Alberta government has kept its funding unchanged at $54 million per year, but interest revenue from legal trust accounts also supports the program and with interest rates so low, that is delivering an ever-dwindling amount of money.
In the 2008/2009 fiscal year, the society received $14.8 million from the interest revenue. In the last fiscal year that slid to $5.9 million and this year the society expects to generate only $800,000.
Legal Aid only recently raised its guidelines in 2008 and Schaffter said lowering them was difficult.
“They took great pride in two years ago raising the financial eligibility guidelines so that more people qualify, which is ultimately what their goal was and then to roll it back was extremely difficult.”
Local defence lawyer Rory Ziv said it is very difficult to represent yourself in the system.
“When people don’t have effective legal representation they are at a significant disadvantage,” he said. “It is unquestionable in the cases that people who have effective representation get better results.”
Ziv said people without a lawyer are more likely to plead guilty even when they shouldn’t.
“You are going to see a lot more guilty pleas, which isn’t necessarily a good thing because after a careful review of the file, the Crown’s case it is not always as strong as it first appears,” he said. “This could lead to unjust outcomes.”
Schaffter said the entire system is being reviewed and Legal Aid hopes to continue to help people in ways other than providing a lawyer for full representation.
“This year we are basically overhauling Legal Aid completely. There is very little about Legal Aid that is staying the same.”
She said the guidelines could go back up if the system is able to find other efficiencies.
“This is not about trying to compromise and try to run people through the system or to elicit guilty pleas from people.”
Some of the other proposals include offering more family law mediation services, giving people advice without full representation and expanding their duty counsel program.
According to the Legal Aid review, Alberta has the third-lowest per capita funding for Legal Aid of any province in the county, ahead of only New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
Carla Kolke, a spokesperson with Alberta Justice, said the review was meant to make the program more sustainable for the long term and did not envision an increase in government funding.
“We are hoping with expanded duty counsel and the other tools that are in place people will be able to be more effective when they are representing themselves.”
She said the government would keep a close eye on the system, but at this point there is no plan for more funding.
“I can’t speak to what our budgets are going to look like next year, but they are reviewed yearly.”
