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The Legal Services Society of B.C. will stop paying lawyers to represent refugees as of Aug. 1 because it has run out of money and has not received promised funding from Ottawa to deal with the fallout from a global humanitarian crisis.

The non-profit legal aid organization handled 860 refugee contracts in 2016-17, compared to 350 in 2013-14, and it expects to accept around 1,400 of 1,900 applications this year.

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Ontario, which has 10 times the volume of cases, and other provincial legal aid plans are facing a similar crisis, which may be slowing federal funds, said Mark Benton, CEO of the society.

“We knew at the start of the year that this was going to be a problem,” he explained Monday. “I think, in part, circumstances have exceeded the federal government’s planning. They announced this year a 20-per-cent increase for immigration refugee legal aid, but as you can see over the last three years we needed a 145-per-cent increase to cover the costs.”