and justice for all

If it weren't for my lawyer, I'd still be in prison.

It went a lot faster with two people digging.

Joe Martin

Mister Boffo

US cartoonist

Well maybe just maybe the new laws in British Columbia will address the issue that for most but the very rich Justice was inaccessible...and don't I know this first hand?

Starting July 1, 2010, litigants in civil and family cases will be allowed three days of trial before being charged court fees. Additional reforms involve fast-tracking civil trials by limiting some legal processes.

"For too many people, access to the courts has become unaffordable," B.C. Attorney General Mike de Jong said during a press conference today.

A sampling of current B.C. Supreme Court costs:

- Commencing a proceeding: $208
- File statement of defence and counterclaim: $208
- Hearing a trial less than half day: $156
- For the first 5 days: $312 daily
- Each additional day after 5: $416
- Each additional day after 10: $624

Additional reforms include:

- Containing legal processes so that they are proportionate to the value, importance and complexity of the case,

- Limiting the sometimes excessive questioning of parties, called oral examinations for discovery.

- Limiting the costly exchange of documents that are not directly relevant to a case.

- Allowing parties the option of having a judge set time limits on litigation events.

New rules for family court are aimed at minimizing family conflict, promoting co-operation and ensuring that the interests of children are paramount.

In the last decade, the number of trials at the B.C. Supreme Court level has halved, while trials that do go ahead have doubled in length. It's a sign, said former Attorney General Wally Oppal, that elements of the system have become outdated.

"Fewer people are finding our courts accessible to solve their problems," Oppal said. "If that happens, our courts...will have lost the confidence of the public."

But opposition NDP justice critic Leonard Krog said the moves came up short.

"There's no money here this morning for legal services," Krog said.

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While these changes are great I have to say they do fall short and most of the blame can be laid at the Provincial Liberal Party. While on one hand they slap on a surcharge on legal fees to help cover the cost of Legal Aid...all of the revenue goes into the general coffers...and on top of that they cut the funding of legal aid leaving most to either beg borrow or steal to pay for a lawyer or go it alone in court...or many others just give up in their quest to access Justice...and in Family Relations most of those who couldn't afford Justice have been women.

And all the horrendous costs just become a strategy tool for unscrupulous snake in the grass slimy so called guardians of the law...for they use them against the opponent running up unnecessary charges, calling, unnecessary witnesses, asking questions of no worth, ignoring the rules of discovery thereby costing the other party needless money for their lawyer to write a letter once again asking for information that by law must be shared. Yes the costs they keep adding up and quick...then before you know it you have spent it all and more and you are nowhere even near closure and this is what they want...they want you to give up...But if you don't and you go in hock even more thinking that when the judgement is handed down you might recoup most of the costs in it and all will be well...

But Law is a fickle thing and at the end of the day there is no guarantee that the Judge will make the whole ball of wax worthwhile in the end...worthwhile meaning make the judgement worth all the tens of thousands of dollars it took to get the judgement...and then if this happens what then? Go back to Court with an appeal and spend tens of thousands more? See how things go and go back for a change the order? Call it a day claim bankruptcy of all the existing debt you got yourself in by going to court to get some assistance to help you get on with your life?

And maybe even worse than the money and all the problems that go with it to grease the wheels of Justice there is the maybe even more important part...and maybe the new rules for family court that are aimed at minimizing family conflict, promoting co-operation and ensuring that the interests of children are paramount will indeed be successful because no matter what happens in the Hollowed Halls of Justice once you walk out those doors much of what went on will affect the relationship of the whole family...it will affect celebrations like weddings, it will affect holidays, it be a barrier even in the Hi how's it going conversations with your kids...for they must remember to keep the two parents apart, never spilling the beans on what is going on with the other...or when the pressure builds they try to be the mediators to make things ok...for what kind of crap must it be for them to be caught in the middle?

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Martin Luther King jr.

Dugald Christie died on a years-long mission of conscience drove him for years

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

Published: Wednesday, August 02, 2006

He bicycled to work. He lived in a rented basement suite. He was a transplanted Scot who eschewed scotch but drank hot water with cream and sugar. A devout Anglican, he kept his offices in a church, arrived for work at daybreak and left, usually, 12 to 14 hours later. He could have made lots of money in his lifetime. He chose instead to make a difference.

Dugald Christie was a lawyer, but he was not like most lawyers. He was not like most people. A colleague called him "the Mother Teresa of the bar." When the Trial Lawyers Association of B.C. honoured him for his life's work in March, he was introduced as being "every lawyer's conscience of their professional obligations" -- this high praise earned in a profession often accused of not having a conscience.

He died Monday at the age of 65. He was struck and killed by a minivan on the Trans-Canada Highway near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

He was riding his bicycle, and it was his conscience that had brought him to that fateful place.

He was cycling across Canada to raise awareness about the average person's lack of access to the judicial system. Christie called it the ABCs of true justice -- affordable, brief and comprehensible -- and he was gathering signatures along the way on a petition he was going to present to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His ultimate destination was St. John's, N.L., where he was to address the Canadian Bar Association.

Christie was the founder and director of the Western Canada Society to Access Justice.

Its work is all done pro bono -- the waiving of legal fees as a charitable act -- and it was Christie's job, or rather his cause in life, to get top-flight lawyers to represent needy clients.

He did this through sheer hard work. Christie was an indefatigable and constant presence -- as good consciences are -- and he was always working the phones to get donations or a lawyer's help.

He knew almost every lawyer in town, and his calls enjoyed a sort of fame among the legal community. With a trace of his Scottish brogue, he would open, simply, with "Dugald Christie here," and the lawyer on the other end of the line knew it was time to pony up.

His work paid off. By the time of his death, Christie and the society had 61 clinics from Campbell River to Winnipeg and more than 400 lawyers donating their services. He made it into the largest legal aid service in the province.

"I have tremendous respect for his ability and commitment to pro bono work," said B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Brenner, "and I know that he had a goal that his clinics would be available to 95 per cent of all British Columbians. I think he achieved that this spring."

Brenner was a fan of Christie's.

"I have in the past described him as not everyone's cup of tea, but he was an achiever, a man who didn't just talk about doing good, but worked hard to do good, and I have great respect for him. I use that old journalistic saying to describe him: He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable."

More often than not, he afflicted those in the law itself.

In 2003, he filed a formal complaint against B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Mary Southin, accusing her of encouraging people to defy smoking laws while continuing to sit in judgment of others.

He maintained Southin had "brought the administration of justice into disrepute" by refusing to stop smoking in her office, despite a 1998 Workers' Compensation ban against smoking in the workplace. He filed the complaint after it was reported then attorney-general Geoff Plant had okayed a $19,000 ventilation system for her office at the Vancouver Law Courts.

But it was Christie's prolonged fight against the province's move in 1993 to impose a seven-per-cent provincial sales tax on legal services that brought him the most notoriety.

Christie maintained that the tax made already expensive legal services even more onerous for most people, and took his complaint to court.

In 2005, the B.C. Supreme Court found that imposing the tax was unconstitutional because it discriminated against the poor. (The case has since gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, which will likely hear it sometime at the end of this year.)

Christie, however, was not always a lawyer who fought for the poor. In another life, he was a top corporate lawyer. He had a big waterfront home in West Vancouver. He had a wife and three children. And then, in 1982, an avalanche roared down a creek and destroyed his home. No one was in it at the time, but the avalanche demolished more than his home. It levelled his belief structure and his preconceptions of the law.

"I think," said his son, Oliver, "that like in many of life's challenges, when there's an unstable situation, it can make you reconsider what your priorities are in life."

In his acceptance speech to the Trail Lawyers Association of B.C. in March, Christie talked about the epiphany he had after that day in 1982.

"I used to have a perfectly normal life," he told the audience, "in fact I thought rather a posh kind of life. I had a beautiful waterfront house in Lions Bay, and a beautiful family -- everything was beautiful!

"And then it all ended and I'd like to say that it was due to pure willpower that I gave up this way of life to serve the poor. But unfortunately, in 1982, the reality is that there was an avalanche which came down Alberta Creek and removed everything and my whole way of life disappeared. The litigation that followed was almost worse than the avalanche itself. "

He had to settle for a nominal judgment of about $5,000, he said, because he couldn't afford the four-month trial. And out of that, he said, he learned a couple of things. He learned that there were a lot of good lawyers out there, many of them who he counted as friends, and he learned that we lived "in a harsh society" made harsher, sometimes, by the legal system itself.

It could be the work of lawyers, he said, to soften society's blows.

"Trial lawyers, who are probably the scum of the scum or the puddle if I might suppose to say, are a terribly misunderstood group," he told his peers.

"But in fact, we are the Good Samaritans. Our business is rescuing victims. And don't I know I've been a victim. I've made friends and followed other people, many of them whom are here, who led me out of that wilderness."

Christie was still following that lead Monday, helping as many as he could out of that same wilderness, as he was bicycling toward Ottawa.

pmcmartin@png.canwest.com