The Canadian Bar Association had asked a court to declare that the federal government and province of British Columbia were under a constitutional obligation to establish a properly funded legal aid system for people who come before the courts with family or other civil law problems. The lawyers' organization launched the test case in B.C., in part because of drastic spending cuts that led to legal aid being abolished for most civil cases. Funding was cut from $85 million to $55 million in recent years. But the case had implications for other provinces, including Ontario, where one in three people seeking legal aid in civil cases gets turned away - even those who may qualify under the rules. "The majority are women needing family law services," said Janet Leiper, chair of Legal Aid Ontario. Each year, about $600 million is spent on legal aid across the country, but most goes to fund criminal cases. In a ruling released late Tuesday, Chief Justice Donald Brenner of the B.C. Supreme Court threw the test case out of court, saying that while legal aid for non-criminal cases is "a serious public issue," the association had no grounds for bringing its claim forward in the interests of the public at large. "The CBA ... has no standing to assert a claim on behalf of an amorphous group of individuals whose Charter rights may have been, or in the future may be breached, by the operation (or more accurately the non-operation) of a public program," he said in his ruling. The association argued that by not providing legal aid for people waging legal battles over important issues like their children, their jobs and their homes, the governments were breaching an unwritten constitutional principle that guarantees everyone equal and meaningful access to the justice system. There is no legal basis for suing over an alleged breach of an unwritten constitutional norm, the judge said. The decision was a victory for the federal and provincial governments, which fought to have the case dismissed before its merits could be argued in court. Ironically, less than a month ago, federal Justice Minister Vic Toews, in a speech to the bar association, lamented how financial barriers are preventing many Canadians from having their day in court. "Only the very rich have genuine access," he said. Susan McGrath, a past president of the bar association and its spokesperson on the issue, said the lawyers' group turned to the courts after two decades of being stonewalled by governments. "We had spent at least 20 years in active negotiations with both the federal and provincial governments, trying to improve funding for legal aid generally and, in latter years, for legal aid in civil cases," she said yesterday. "And frankly, we made no progress. "It didn't matter what arguments we made," she said. Judge Brenner, however, did not accept the association's argument that its test case was the most reasonable and effective way of bringing the issue before the courts. One alternative, he suggested, was to have an individual litigant come forward personally, represented by a lawyer acting pro bono. While organizations such as the bar association do have some limited right to bring cases forward on behalf of the wider public interest, it's usually only in situations where a piece of legislation is being challenged or government officials are accused of acting outside the scope of their powers, he said. But that's not the case here. "What the plaintiff effectively seeks in the case at bar is to have the court conduct an inquiry on the subject of civil legal aid," he said. Brenner said it was like the Canadian Medical Association asking a court to declare that Canadians have a constitutional right to minimum wait times for certain medical procedures and then to figure out what they were. But McGrath said a bar association task force, which spent years researching and preparing the case, didn't want to put low-income Canadians struggling with financial and legal problems through the additional stresses of protracted litigation.