Parsing Ontario's legal aid boycott

This Magazine's blog has published a post by Kim Hart Macneill about the Ontario legal aid boycott that told me some things I didn't know, or may have missed elsewhere.

One was making the comparison between the 15% fee increase that legal aid had received over the past 22 years and the fact that Crown attorneys have received a 57% wage increase in the past 10 years.

Another was the huge number of "big case management" cases that the lawyers are boycotting -- major criminal or gang-related crime.

There are currently about 1230 active BCMs, 96 per cent were carried over from 2007-2008. In the first 6 months of 2009, 318 news cases were added and only 273 were resolved. The average length of a BCM is 3 to 4 years, and the average cost per defence lawyer in these cases is almost $30,000.