Young Bar Association lawyer vocal about lack of accessibility in court system

Montreal lawyer Mathieu Piché-Messier has resolved to make 2008 the year that more free legal services become more available to the public.

"One of my main goals as head of the Young Bar Association of Montreal is accessibility to justice through an expansion of all of our pro-bono (free consultation) services," said Piché-Messier, the 32-year-old lawyer who is president of the Young Bar Association of Montreal and a commercial fraud litigator at the Montreal office of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP.

It is not an easy proposition or ambition.

Members of the judiciary have become more vocal in the past year about the lack of access to the court system, not only because of the long delays for a case to be heard, but because of the high cost of hiring a lawyer for representation.

In one telling sign of the depth of the problem, even the Supreme Court of Canada has instructions on its website counseling people on how to go about representing themselves in the event they cannot afford to hire a lawyer.

"There is a great gap of the population that does not have access to justice," Piché-Messier said.

While the Quebec government provides free legal aid services to less affluent individuals, the threshold for eligibility stops for those who earn at least minimum wage and does not apply to those on an old age pension, a situation that is "completely absurd," Piché-Messier said.

The Young Bar offers four pro-bono programs and is working on expanding them (click on the public-services link at www.ajbm.qc.ca)

They include free legal counseling for people preparing for small claims court (Montreal district only and the date of the hearing must be set); a free one-hour counseling session for people starting up a business, a telephone hotline operated each Wednesday afternoon for teenagers who can call on an anonymous basis, and an annual telephone clinic offered for one weekend each spring, usually in April.

Piché-Messier said the Young Bar is working on offering the annual legal clinic on a province-wide basis this year through a 1-800 number and participation by young lawyers who work outside the Montreal region.

It is also beginning a pilot project to help people who need legal advice for an appearance before the Quebec rental board.

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Access to justice is also a "critical issue" of concern for the Canadian Association of Provincial Court Judges, said the organization's recently elected president, Judge Thérèse Alexander, who sits in New Westminster, B.C., and is one of four bilingual judges in the province.

"We will be setting up a working group to work with the Canadian Bar Association and the Council of Chief Judges and other organizations, to explore ways to enhance public accessibility to justice.

"Provincial courts offer the greatest number of access points in Canadian communities and we should strive to enhance the service we can to provide to the public in each," Alexander said.

The association represents about 1,000 provincial territorial, military and permanent Quebec municipal judges.

Alexander takes over the post of president from Montreal-born Irwin Lampert, now a provincial judge in Moncton. She studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris and Université du Québec à Trois Rivières before earning her law degree in British Columbia.

Judge Jean-Paul Decoste of Rimouski is first vice-president of the organization for the coming year.

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As of next week, Dino Mazzone officially becomes part of the business law team at the Montreal office of McMillan Binch Mendelsohn LLP after more than three years as the in-house counsel for the Shoppers Drug Mart/Pharmaprix pharmacy chain.

Mazzone said the company is seeking to replace him with a bilingual lawyer who will be based in Toronto.

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