A new report published today by a research team at Allard Law highlights the challenges BC residents face when looking to access public legal education and information.
Titled Flourishing: A Plan to Strengthen Public Legal Education and Information, the report makes 30 recommendations to improve the resources and supports that help BC residents understand the law and navigate legal issues.
Dr. Catherine Dauvergne, KC, the academic lead on the project, says her team found that although there is a plethora of useful, accurate legal information and resources available to BC residents, finding the right information can be a serious challenge. Currently, some of the most widely used resources in the province include legal information hotlines such as AskJES, a legal information hotline staffed by Allard Law students, as well as websites like the People’s Law School, which provides guidance on topics including how to write your own will.
Over the course of an 18-month study, researchers asked BC residents across the province about their experiences seeking legal information and found that many people experienced long wait times, struggles with legal jargon and a lot of frustration.
“People reported being referred over and over and over again, but never to a place that could actually help them,” says Dauvergne. “In every focus group, we had people crying as they recounted the different parts of their journey. It’s really disheartening.”
There's all sorts of evidence that the longer people have a legal problem, the more that flows into other aspects of life.
The report’s top recommendations include creating a dedicated phoneline to support wayfinding and legal triage, as well as a central hub organization to pool research, share best practices and increase collaboration across the free-legal-resource ecosystem.
“This support is a really important piece of the access to justice puzzle,” says Dauvergne. “It’s not going to solve the access to justice crisis, but our recommendations can make a contribution to reducing the amount of frustration, emotional drain and time that takes people to resolve their legal issues. There's all sorts of evidence that the longer people have a legal problem, the more that flows into other aspects of life.”
Aara Johnson, Project Director, shares that public legal education and information is unique in BC. “In speaking with individuals in Canada, Australia, the UK and the US, many say that BC is more innovative,” adds Johnson. “These recommendations will strengthen what is already seen as a rich ecosystem of resources.”
Another key recommendation is to increase hiring and support for frontline legal information providers, who may not have formal legal training. “We learned a great deal about what it’s like to be the only person in a small community in the north of the province who is available to answer legal questions,” says Dauvergne. It can be “isolating and hard to know if you're right – and it's high stakes.”
If we repeated this work five years from now, I’d like to see people getting help faster, feeling less frustrated and more confident that they know where to go for help.
Working in partnership with the BC First Nations Justice Council, the team also found that resources addressing the specific needs of Indigenous people and communities were often not available. The report recommends supporting the BC First Nations Justice Council through both partnerships and funding, to increase its capacity to develop and co-develop resources.
The report, funded by the Law Foundation of British Columbia and co-sponsored by the Law Foundation and the BC Ministry of the Attorney General, also highlights a number of strengths that organizations can build upon. “We learned that the people who do this kind of frontline legal work are very, very dedicated human beings who are working incredibly hard,” Dauvergne says, noting that “their work is greatly appreciated by the people they're serving.” And, despite challenges, staff at the newly established Indigenous Justice Centres, created by the BC First Nations Justice Council, described their work as overwhelmingly positive.
Dauvergne hopes the report’s recommendations will set an agenda that leads to meaningful change. “If we repeated this work five years from now, I’d like to see people getting help faster, feeling less frustrated and more confident that they know where to go for help.”
Read the full report: Flourishing: A Plan to Strengthen Public Legal Education and Information
