CBC Canada
Alberta Justice is preparing to lay off 90 civil-law lawyers as its legal services division struggles to absorb a $20-million budget cut, an internal memo obtained by CBC News shows.
The document also reveals government departments will be “outsourcing considerably more legal work than they are now.”
Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer is making the cuts despite an internal draft white paper that found outsourcing of legal work by the government will cost about two to three times more than retaining lawyers and doing the work in house.
CBC News has obtained a copy of the white paper, which was created for review and discussion within the Legal Services division of Alberta Justice.
The white paper said government lawyers are paid less than their private counterparts and their salaries have been “largely frozen for the past several years, whereas there is no mechanism for such capping in the private legal sector.”
Assistant deputy minister Tom Rothwell sent the memo about the looming cuts to civil lawyers Wednesday.
In it, he said the legal services division tried to take a more “incremental” and methodical approach to implementing cuts, but that was rejected by the government.
Rothwell said the legal division wanted to focus on “assessing what legal services would be cut or reduced, and using that analysis to determine where downsizing should be implemented,” as well as “creating a proposal that would see the division reduce our budget by about $10 million at the end of three years” — half the targeted reduction.
“We recently received confirmation that any proposal must meet the full $20-million reduction, as opposed to an incremental approach,” Rothwell wrote.
“Creative ideas to reduce costs, such as having lawyers move to other departments and then being seconded back to the division, or having lawyers work less hours at reduced salaries, etc. will not allow us to meet the budget targets and do not reduce the size and cost of the public sector,” the memo says.
Rothwell said the cuts will impact legal services the Justice lawyers provide to all government departments, as legal teams shrink and focus on government work deemed a priority.
“Although we will continue to seek to mitigate the impact of the budget reduction, at this point in time, in order to meet our 2022/23 budget target, the division must provide working notice to about 90 lawyers in January 2020.”
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