The puzzle of canadian legal aid

Provincial criminal legal aid programs vary significantly in terms of per capita and average costs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that could potentially explain the differences in the relative costs of criminal legal aid among the provinces. The main factor considered is the type of service delivery model, which is determined according to whether services are provided mostly by private bar lawyers (judicare models), staff lawyers employed directly by the legal aid plan (staff models) or a mixture of the two (mixed models). One hypothesis is that the closer a service delivery model is to a staff model, the lower will be costs. The proximity of a legal aid program to a staff model is determined by the percentage of criminal legal aid cases referred to staff lawyers. Simple OLS regressions are run to test this hypothesis, which is not supported by the results.