The working claim in the *A2Jai* manifesto is that the Canadian legal system, for the majority of Canadians, operates in one of two modes: dormant or predatory. It is dormant where a citizen could summon its remedial power and cannot. It is predatory where it arrives uninvited — through enforcement, family proceedings, child welfare, or immigration detention — and the citizen has no meaningful counsel in the room. The formulation is rhetorical, but it tracks what the empirical record shows.
Begin with the dormant end. Ordinary Canadians encounter civil and family justice problems at rates that would trigger a public-health response in any other sector. The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice's national cost-of-justice survey found that roughly 48.4% of adult Canadians experienced a serious civil or family justice problem over a three-year period.[1] Most did not reach a lawyer, a court, or any formal resolution. The most common response was to do nothing, or to absorb the loss.
The predatory end is where the market-failure framing becomes hardest to deny. The National Self-Represented Litigants Project found that, on provincial and territorial filing data, between 40% and 57% of parties in family matters appeared without counsel.[2] In some filing-stage samples the figure reached as high as 74%.[3] These are not strategic elections by the litigants. Macfarlane's interviews make clear that the overwhelming driver is cost.[4]
In Ontario — the province with the most mature legal aid infrastructure in the country — the gross-income threshold for a single person to qualify for a Legal Aid Ontario certificate sat at $22,720 for years, and was raised to $45,440 only in March 2025 as part of a time-limited expansion.[5] Above that line sits the working majority of the province,[6] earning too much to qualify for a certificate and far too little to retain counsel at market rates. The gap between "free" and "affordable" is not filled by anything.
Moreover, that's for the two most urgent legal calamities, and
The manifesto's two-word framing — dormant, predatory — is a compression of these two observations. Dormant because the system is effectively unavailable for the civil and family disputes that actually dominate ordinary life. Predatory because, when the citizen is compelled into the system, the asymmetry is structural: the state has counsel, the landlord has counsel, the institutional party has counsel, and the individual does not.
It is important to name what the framing is not. It is not a claim that the bar is venal, or that individual lawyers are extracting monopoly rents. The defence bar, duty counsel, legal aid staff lawyers, and legal clinic advocates routinely carry caseloads that would break any sustainable professional economics, at fee levels that are low by any comparable-labour benchmark. The failure is not moral. It is a failure of design: a century and a half of overhead, specialization, and credentialing has produced a unit cost that cannot be reconciled with the unit price a non-wealthy Canadian can pay. That is a market failure in the ordinary economic sense — supply and demand cannot clear at any price the market will bear.
What does the framing commit the manifesto to? It commits it to a remedy that does not pretend the problem is a shortage of lawyers or a shortage of good intentions. Canada has had both for decades, and the unmet need has not materially moved. The commitment is to a different mechanism entirely — one that decouples legal help from the hourly-billing, credentialed-practitioner model for the cases where that model will never clear. That is a harder claim than "more funding" or "more pro bono," and it is the claim the manifesto is actually making.
The dormant-predatory dyad is therefore not a slogan. It is the diagnosis from which the rest of the manifesto follows. If the diagnosis is wrong, the remedy is wrong. If the diagnosis is right, then any serious response must accept that the current allocation of legal help in Canada is not a problem awaiting effort. It is a problem awaiting a new system, structure, disruption. If democracy was the answer, then voters would not tolerate the status quo on A2J, but the truth is that democracy has made clear that the A2J status quo is either acceptable or irrelevant to them. Only some progressive social justice aficionados think otherwise, comprising a proportion of the voting population that has failed to grow to the point where a government was elected to undertake this system change. Such is the limits of majoritarianism within democratic systems, in my experience of a decade in public office. Traditional democratic mechanisms often fail to address systemic issues that lack broad majority appeal unless they can be strategically weaponized by parties as "wedge issues" to stimulate voter turnout.[7] In my view, the only plausible future for improving access to justice is A2Jai.
Notes
**[1]** Trevor C W Farrow et al, *Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report* (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2016) at 7.
**[2]** Julie Macfarlane, *The National Self-Represented Litigants Project: Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants — Final Report* (May 2013) at 33, online: representingyourselfcanada.com.
**[3]** *Ibid* at 33–34.
**[4]** *Ibid* at 39–44 (discussing cost as the dominant reason litigants proceed without counsel).
**[5]** Legal Aid Ontario, "LAO raising financial eligibility thresholds beginning March 3" (3 March 2025), online: https://www.legalaid.on.ca/in-briefs/lao-raising-financial-eligibility-thresholds-beginning-march-3/
**[6]** Median income for Ontarians in 2023 for households was $78,600: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250501/dq250501b-eng.htm
**[7]** Daniel A Smith & Caroline J Tolbert, "The Initiative to Party: Partisanship and Ballot Initiatives in California" (2001) 7:6 Party Politics 739. The only alternative to bypass institutional gridlock would be a bottom-up "safety valve" like a citizen initiative, in the US, but that option is not available to every jurisdiction. Matthew Mendelsohn & Andrew Parkin, eds, *Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Matt Qvortrup, *Direct Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Theory and Practice of Government by the People* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Regardless, such successful ballot measures now require massive financial resources—often leading to "elite capture"—meaning a passionate but underfunded minority is ultimately left without a viable mechanism for systemic change in either representative or direct democracy. See Thad Kousser & Mathew D McCubbins, "Social Choice, Crypto-Initiatives, and Policymaking by Direct Democracy" (2005) 78 S Cal L Rev 949 Melissa Murray & Katherine Shaw, "The Promise and Peril of Direct Democracy After Dobbs" (2026) 112:1 Va L Rev 1. David Altman, "Decompressing to prevent unrest: political participation through citizen-initiated mechanisms of direct democracy" (2025) Social Movement Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2025.2554602.