Barb McDonald says staff at Legal Aid Saskatchewan saved her daughter.
Tamara Hesketh-Jones deals with addictions and McDonald says Legal Aid helped every time she needed. They got her out of jail, into detox and sober.
“If she hadn't have had Legal Aid she’d be dead today. I can tell you that honestly,” McDonald says. “They helped her to the point where nobody else would.”
It’s that type of support McDonald and others are concerned will disappear come September, when nine jobs will be cut at Legal Aid in Saskatoon.
After laying off six support staff and not filling three duty counsel lawyer positions there will be one duty counsel lawyer and one legal assistant in the Saskatoon criminal office.
Duty counsel lawyers do docket court work which includes bail hearings and sentencing.
Prior to the layoffs, there were four duty counsel lawyers and three legal assistants in the criminal office who worked on more than 3,000 files a year.
Lack of consistency, experience
Much of the duty counsel work will be farmed out to private lawyers, but many in the legal community, including former judge Sheila Whelan, say staffed Legal Aid lawyers are the best people to serve Legal Aid clients.
Whelan is afraid clients will get lost in the system and wonders how Legal Aid staff will manage.
“The private bar doesn’t have the same advantages that the clinic system does with all the support staff, the connections, the background information,” Whelan says.
“They know the families. They know if there’s been an ongoing problem. They’re going to have a good idea if someone needs a psychiatric assessment or a psychological assessment because they’ve worked with them over time.”
Legal Aid staff has connections to community resources and decades of experience, which is important when representing Legal Aid clients, she says.
“I’m not sure whether (clients) get that through the private bar, or whether they'll get a lot of younger lawyers who are gathering experience,” Whelan says.
Future operations
The specifics of how Legal Aid will operate in Saskatoon after the cuts remain unclear. Legal Aid CEO Craig Goebel didn’t respond to specific operational questions.
Goebel and the commission’s board chair Michelle Ouellette declined interviews with CTV News but in emailed statements both said Saskatoon’s family and criminal offices will be merged and an application call centre will open in Regina.
Ouellette wrote the commission is confident the changes, “will go a long way to improving the delivery of legal services to the vulnerable citizens who comprise Legal Aid’s clientele.”
Cost concerns
CTV News obtained an email sent on behalf of Goebel to private lawyers asking them to sign up for one designated day per week to do Legal Aid work.
The email says there would be a maximum of eight files assigned to one lawyer per day and they’d be paid the regular Legal Aid rate of $88 an hour. There would be no cap on the amount of hours they can bill for each case, according to the email.
“The lawyer is responsible for documenting all time spent on the files as per the current farmout practice. This time accounting will be audited by Head Office,” the email reads.
On-call lawyers who are not assigned any files would be paid $220 per day as a flat fee for being available in case work came their way.
It’s unclear what, if any, additional cost this could mean for taxpayers but those in the legal community CTV News spoke with say it could end up being more costly.
Private lawyer Jessie Buydens has a decade of experience in doing legal aid farm outs but isn’t signing up under the new model because she can’t commit to one day a week to the Legal Aid work.
She says the new model could cost more and lead to more delays but it’s difficult to say for certain because it depends on Legal Aid’s budget, how each private lawyer handles files and what the files entail.
“A bail hearing could be as quick as 15 or 20 minutes in court and there are definitely bail hearings that would be a day or two on a more complicated matter,” she says.
Buydens has questions about how files will be handled by private lawyers: if the private lawyer assigned to Mondays doesn’t resolve the file on Monday, would they adjourn that case to the following Monday when they are doing Legal Aid work again, or pass it on to the next private lawyer doing work?
“(Passing it to the next lawyer) would increase costs, but if the Monday lawyer kept it to Monday it would increase time in custody,” she explains. “Some things you can absolutely resolve on the first appearance but in the event that you can’t, it might create more of a delay or more of a cost.”
Delay concerns
Whelan says the new model could end up creating a delay in cases going to trial and add to the time someone is on remand, two constant concerns in Saskatchewan’s justice system, she says.
“The duty counsel won’t necessarily take the file to trial. If they don’t resolve it in docket court, it goes back to the staff at Legal Aid, and if there numbers are reduced, how are those (cases) going to come to trial more quickly for those people on remand?”
Saskatchewan Justice Minister Don Morgan declined an interview with CTV News citing independence between the ministry and Legal Aid, but did say there has been no cut to funding; the commission received $23.9 million from the province for the year ending March 31, 2017 and $24.2 million for the year ending March 31, 2018.
