Legal aid funding, a conviction results in deportation, and a licence plate revoked

This week on Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan:

British Columbia has a special provincial sales tax that applies to all legal bills. It is supposed to be dedicated to funding legal aid. The tax now collects more than twice the amount that is provided for legal aid. The extra, more than $100 million per year, is used for general government revenue and, as a result, the legal aid system in British Columbia is underfunded.

The diversion of the tax revenue has several unfortunate results.

Financial eligibility for legal aid is so low that a single person with a full-time minimum wage job is considered too rich to be helped by legal aid but would be very unlikely to be able to afford legal help.

People with legal problems that were previously covered by legal aid no longer receive any help. These include poverty law and many kinds of family law problems.

Even when legal problems are covered by legal aid, the amount paid to hire a lawyer is so low it can be difficult to find an experienced lawyer willing to help.

A further systemic difficulty with legal aid in BC is that decisions about how legal aid is to be provided are no longer independent of the provincial government, which is often opposed in interest to the people receiving help from legal aid. This has had real implications for how legal aid helps people. For example, the provincial government has authorized legal aid to assist people who are making slightly more than minimum wage, and who are charged with criminal offences, but only if they agree to plead guilty quickly.

Having poor people plead guilty quickly may save the provincial government money, but it is not fair that they only receive legal help if they agree to do this.

Despite all these serious problems, the provincial government recently announced a small increase in legal aid funding amounting to just over $8 million per year.

Amongst other things, the additional funding will support the Child and Youth Legal Centre which provided legal help to young people who are involved in child protection of family law disputes. This will assist judges in considering the wishes of young people when deciding how they should be dealt with in these kinds of cases.

Young people can get this kind of help by calling 1-877-462-0037.

Also on the show, a case involving an application for additional time to appeal a conviction for fraud over $5,000 arising from a guilty plea to cheating at baccarat. Because the man that plead guilty was not a Canadian citizen, he was being deported.

While the man had no previous criminal record and was married with three children who were Canadian citizens, a conviction for an offence for which someone could receive a sentence of 10 years or more makes the person ineligible to remain in Canada on the grounds of “serious criminality”.

In this case, even though he only received a sentence of 90 days, he was still being deported because of the sentence he could have received.

The man’s application for additional time to appeal was refused on the basis that his appeal had no reasonable prospect of success.

Finally, on the show, a man who had his personalized licence plate with his last name, Grabher, was not permitted to renew it after 27 years because it was deemed to support sexualized violence. His application to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was refused based on freedom of expression.

Follow this link for a transcript of the show and links to the cases discussed.