The lawyer's group "is not giving up without a fight," said Susan McGrath, a family law lawyer from Iroquois Falls, Ont. and an association spokesperson on legal aid issues.

Decades of cutbacks and neglect have left Canada's legal aid system "in crisis," she said in a statement released today.

"On the advice of our legal team, we're moving ahead with an appeal."

The association spent decades of lobbying provincial, territorial and federal governments to increase legal aid funding, particularly for people who land before the courts with family or other civil law problems. When its efforts got nowhere, it took its battle to the courts, by way of a test case launched in British Columbia.

It asked the B.C. Supreme Court to declare that Ottawa and that province had a constitutional obligation to establish a properly-funded legal aid system who haven't been charged with a criminal offence, but have serious legal problems nonetheless.

Legal aid for civil cases has largely been gutted across the country. It's also being restricted in family law cases. In Ontario, one in three people applying for legal aid for non-criminal law problems are being turned away. Most of the $600 million a year spent on legal aid services in Canada is used in the defence of individuals accused of crimes.

Last month, however, Chief Justice Donald Brenner of the B.C. Supreme Court threw the association's test case out of court.

Brenner saying that while the need for legal aid in 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 - or, as he put it, an "amorphous group of individuals, whose Charter rights may have been, or in the future may be breached."

It would have been more appropriate for an individual to have brought the case forward, he said.

But the association believes it's "unreasonable" to insist that people with low incomes, who are denied legal aid in cases where they have been unjustly evicted or run the risk of losing custody of their children, be required to start their own individual constitutional challenge, McGrath said.