As Doug Schweitzer finished university and began his legal career, he, like other young graduates, vied for articling positions at Canada’s top law firms.
New legislation from the NDP government will soon steer the heartbroken away from our adversarial court systems as they try to sort out such thorny issues as separation, divorce, property division, child support and custody arrangements.
Chris Clarke knows what it’s like to endure poverty while simultaneously going to university, holding down a job and struggling to find legal help while going through a divorce. So, when Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Justice first put out a call in 2018 to find and train family law lawyers interested in providing legal coaching, he signed on.
Hadley Friedland was just outside a conference room in Edmonton, speaking over the phone about a presentation on Indigenous law she’d just made to a room full of lawyers and legal academics. The conference was being sponsored by the Law Society of Alberta.
First, at the end of June 2018, provincial and small claims court fees were increased. Then, seven months later, after a review of court fees by the province’s justice department, a slew of fees at the Court of Queen’s Bench and Court of Appeal were hiked up — in some cases doubling.
