by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

For the next five years, more Quebecers will be eligible for free legal aid. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if you’re not on welfare or old age pension, you’ll likely still have to pay for your own lawyer.

New rules announced January 26 dictate that a Quebecer living alone earning $9,695 or less can get free legal aid, and by 2010, the earning threshold will inch up to $12,093, meaning that an estimated 2,590,000 Quebecers will be able to get a government-paid lawyer, 900,000 more than today, according to the provincial Justice Ministry. The province will gobble up the additional cost of $30-mil a year.

But those who help the poor with the law had been lobbying for a much bigger expansion of legal aid.

“Such a minimal change still denies access to justice because it maintains the exclusion of most poor,” says Lise Ferland, longtime director of Pointe St-Charles Legal Services. “They’ll still be ineligible to access a lawyer or even get legal information.” Her legal aid clinic and at least 57 other groups had petitioned the government to allow minimum wage earners to get legal aid.

“These people are often in precarious situations and are pitted against much stronger opponents,” she says. “If they have legal battles to fight, they might just back down because it costs too much to hire a lawyer and the system is complicated.”

The Quebec Justice Ministry hopes that those trying to navigate the legal system on the cheap can benefit from its legal info Web site (www.educaloi.qc.ca). But Ferland is skeptical that such a resource will do much. “Not everybody can decipher that sort of documentation, and even if someone has a certain education, to apply it to a particular situation requires certain skills that not all people have,” she says.

One academic who has long kept an eye on alienation between Montreal’s less affluent and the legal system is McGill Law Prof Roderick MacDonald. In 1993, he conducted a formal study to find out who was using the small claims court system, which was designed initially to make justice accessible to have-nots.

“We discovered that a third of all plaintiffs in the small claims court were actually professionals claiming fees and I think around 16 per cent were lawyers claiming fees from their clients,” he says. “We found overrepresentation among white, male, well-educated, anglo, franco professionals between 35 and 55. The more you’d look like me, the greater the chances you’d be a plaintiff.”

Those most different from that description, such as a less-educated allophone female, simply didn’t use the small claims court system. “They were effectively invisible in the court,” says MacDonald.

Whether the absence of the poor in the self-serve litigation system has led to additional suffering among the poor isn’t clear. “That’s the $64,000 question,” he says. “The hardest question in social research is tracking down the dog that didn’t bark.”

Ferland, who counsels welfare recipients on such civil issues as divorce, government aid and consumer issues, believes the poor who suffer most from ineligibility for legal aid are those charged with a crime. “For them, when they get in front of a judge it’s like they’re starting at minus one,” she says.