Interview with the Chief Justice of Canada, the Rt. Hon. Richard Wagner

David Milosevic

Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice. Thank you very much for joining the Ontario Bar Association, Civil Litigation Executive this morning.

Chief Justice Wagner

Good morning, David. It's my pleasure to be here.

David Milosevic

Well, it's a great honour to have you here, sir. I want to discuss the theme of access to justice with you today. And before we go into some of the questions I was hoping, if you could tell our readers, why is access to justice an important goal for the civil justice system? And how would you explain what access to justice is?

Chief Justice Wagner

Well, we've been talking about access to justice for quite a while now. I remember when I was the equivalent of the treasurer of the Bar in Montréal back in 2001, 2002 and we were talking about access to justice in those days. In those days only a few stakeholders were talking about access to justice. Now, I think everybody understands that there is, there was, and there is still a problem of access to justice. The other big difference is that now we're talking about actions for access to justice. That's why I'm so optimistic for the future, because everybody realizes that it is necessary to take action and tackle this issue.

Chief Justice Wagner

So what do we mean by access to justice? It means many things. It means first of all, access to legal information because before going to court or to make a claim, or to defend a claim, you have to know about your rights. That's the first step - access to legal information. And that is why it's important, as a first step, that people can have access to legal information and can also understand how the courts are working. It is also very difficult for somebody to have trust in something that you don't know.

Then you have to have access to the courts. You have to be able to afford to pay a lawyer. And so it brings into the question the threshold for legal aid, for instance.