Chief Justice of Canada’s Remarks on Access to Justice
Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin spoke last week at the University of Toronto’s Access to Civil Justice for Middle Income Canadians Colloquium about how ordinary people risk being priced out of the justice system. In her speech, she called on governments, academics, judges and lawyers to work to ensure better access to justice for all Canadians.
Her speech and the colloquium attracted some media attention:
- Access to justice becoming a privilege of the rich, judge warns (Globe and Mail, February 10, 2011)
- Legal system doesn’t work for ordinary people, top judge says (Vancouver Sun, February 14, 2011)
More about the University of Toronto’s Middle Income Access to Civil Justice Initiative
In September 2008 the Chief Justice gave an earlier version of this speech to a select audience at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver. I’m not a lawyer and wasn’t in the audience but I found the speech online. I wrote to her in her capacity as Chair of the Canadian Judicial Council and in January 2009 she returned to the Wosk Centre – this time at a function that was open to the public – and gave the same speech again. I was in the audience that time
I have to say candidly that this is not helping the legal establishment deal with the challenge it is facing, which I believe is the prospect of losing the monopoly on legal services. In fact I am building a case to put to the political establishment that the monopoly is unconstitutional because it denies most persons who want to access civil justice procedure the means to fairly prepare and present a case that will meet that of an adverse party that enjoys the advantage of professional counsel. I can speak very knowledgeably about that because I’ve had that experience several times and I am maintaining that in each instance the result wasn’t even close to a fair hearing.