A questionnaire sent to all federal parties is trying to raise the attention of the next federal government to the growing problem of accessing justice in Canada.

The questionnaire, prepared by the National Self-Represented Litigants Project at the University of Windsor, asks the parties for their thoughts on topics including ensuring Canadians have access to affordable legal services, working with provinces on maintaining sustainable legal aid and looking at whether providers other than lawyers could and should be providing legal services.

“The purpose is to try to raise the profile of access to justice as a topic in a federal election, because historically we haven’t really had a lot of conversations about access to justice issues in federal elections,” said Julie Macfarlane, project director and law professor at the university.

Justice is mainly in the jurisdiction of the provinces, but Macfarlane said a federal government could at the very least make its views known on certain topics, and become involved in discussions over the diversification of legal services. She noted that over half of litigants appear now in family court without a lawyer, with the number closer to 80 per cent in some areas.

“The number of Canadians this crisis is affecting means it’s not satisfactory any longer for the federal government to sit back and say it’s up to the provinces. It requires national action,” she said.

The questionnaire was first sent to the parties about a month ago, but so far only the Green Party has responded. It’s the first election where the project has contacted the parties directly to get their views on access to justice; in 2015, the project put questions on its website and social media, encouraging people to take them to their candidates.

In their responses, the Greens said they would, for example, work with the provinces to establish a national legal aid plan to provide “stable, long-term funding,” and would also work with law societies (which regulate the legal profession in each province) to improve access to justice and to look at the issue of what services non-lawyers could provide to the general public.

Macfarlane pointed out that legal aid plans across the country have been criticized over the years for being underfunded, with too many individuals making too much money to qualify for legal aid assistance, but not enough to afford their own lawyer. In Ontario, the legal aid budget was slashed by 30 per cent in the spring budget.

But Macfarlane also said legal aid will not completely solve the access to justice crisis.

“I don’t think legal aid can solve the problem, what will solve this problem will be some kind of diversification of more affordable services, with different types of trained people doing different levels of work just like in the medical world,” she said.

The questionnaire also asks the parties about what kind of skills judges should have, noting that more and more members of the public are now appearing before them without a lawyer and trying to navigate the system on their own.

Macfarlane said the public should be having a greater say in judicial appointments. There are lay people who currently sit on the various advisory committees that screen applications for federal judicial appointments, but Macfarlane said these individuals do not always “reflect the user experience of the general public, nor the diversity of our communities.”