Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister's answer. If someone was waiting to go to court and they weren't seen in a reasonable time or they couldn't get a lawyer to serve them, the challenge then becomes are we being fairly served by the law. I wouldn't want to think that somebody who qualifies for legal aid who can't be served through the justice system...I underscore the fact that we are only talking about family law. I appreciate the Minister always mentioning criminal law, but that's not my main concern here in this particular case.
I think rights, to one degree or another, being denied. We are allowing, in some cases, caustic situations to go on. I don't want that to happen when it comes to child custody matters or maybe some divorce matters that truly need to be settled. What about maintenance matters where parents struggle to make ends meet? It's the concern of those specific areas. We have difficult situations that we need clear rules and guidelines for the folks to make sure that someone is able to feed their kids or to be able to afford rent somewhere. I see it where we are allowing them to be in a situation that we could do something about.
I was told a few weeks ago, directly by a lawyer, that they don't see it as an affordable way to practice or to run their practice, because it was expressed to me that the tariffs don't allow them to make any money. So if they can make $250 an hour or more, $300 or $350, whatever the case is they charge, it's difficult to then convince them with a carrot by saying we will pay you $125. I only say that because I can't remember that exact tariff, but it's in that range.
So it almost becomes a moral issue when they want to help the system. It's difficult to encourage that. We have an ethical duty. We tell them the system will be there for them and it causes me serious difficulty to say the system can only run because we only have so many lawyers. I respect that because that is just the fact, but I am worried about the underlying guarantees. I feel like we betrayed them. The system allows them to be qualified and I fear that one day we will have a horrible scenario where one of these custody cases crossed the line when it shouldn't have. No fault of the government, I believe, but the fact is we weren't able to provide a service. It all comes back to clarity was never established, maintenance orders may not have come into place, somebody acted because of the stressful situation that maybe we needed something to be established; established by court, that is.
When I said in my opening comments, I said let's think new. Let's think innovative. Let's reach beyond what we normally go for. Would the Minister consider options about opening up discussions with the Yukon territory and maybe the Nunavut territory? Maybe there is a way we can start marrying our family law practices because we seem to keep coming into difficulties when they talk about relationships between lawyers in the sense of conflicts, too many files in the same office and the difficulty and the benefits that would be created by creating a new law office in Yellowknife where we would be getting a certain amount of files on one side of the case out of that office and we don't have to worry about conflicts.
I am going to ask some similar questions when it comes to Justice and if we have some shortage. The Justice Minister may want to lead in that area to see if it's considered reasonable. It's time to be innovative with our abilities. I don't see the Yukon, from my perspective, that out of touch with what we do here. Now I recognize that you would have to qualify for the bar, and that's not the issue. I also see the fact that the Nunavut law system essentially was a mirroring of ours. I don't see it as a major stretch. Could we look at maybe making or opening some kind of discussion up to help some of these family law cases? Maybe a pan-territorial perspective. I don't know if it would be easy and I wouldn't want to give that impression that I had this little epiphany the other day and it could be solved tomorrow, but the fact is that's how things get done. Somebody comes along with something new and innovative. Maybe it's time for us to figure out new ways of doing business. Does the Minister have any comments on a new way of doing business? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.