Vancouver lawyer loses bid to overturn N.W.T. legal aid decision

A Vancouver lawyer has lost his court case against the Northwest Territories Legal Aid Commission.

Veteran lawyer David Tarnow was challenging legal aid's decision not to give him any new work this year. He said the commission told him he was not getting any new work because it had increased the number of Alberta lawyers on its roster of out-of-town lawyers and said it was less expensive and more efficient to use those lawyers than to bring him up from Vancouver.

But in a written decision released on Tuesday, N.W.T. Supreme Court Justice Virginia Schuler said being denied work this year does not amount to being removed from the list. Schuler said Tarnow had presented no evidence to show he would never be called on again by the commission.

Schuler said the law does not give her the authority to review legal aid decisions about which lawyers are assigned to which cases.

Tarnow also lost his bid to have a tweet from an Ottawa lawyer introduced as evidence after the case was heard. In the tweet, the lawyer laments the possibility of missing out on his first time working as a legal aid lawyer in Inuvik due to COVID-19.

Tarnow said it would cost more for legal aid to fly up that lawyer than it would have to fly him up from Vancouver to do that circuit, undermining legal aid's explanation that it was going with Alberta lawyers because, in part, it's less expensive to fly them up.

In her decision, Schuler said that months ago, legal aid provided Tarnow with a schedule that included the names of lawyers assigned to do legal aid work for the first six months of this year. The lawyer who tweeted about working in Inuvik was on that list.

Tarnow is still representing clients in three N.W.T. cases he began working on last year.