Under Arrest? No Lawyer? Who You Gonna Call?

In 1990 the Supreme Court, ruled that police had improperly denied an Alberta man charged with second degree murder his 10(b) Charter right “to retain and instruct counsel without delay. So they upheld his acquittal at trial. The accused was Willam Brydges.    

As a consequence all Canadian provinces now have an arrangement whereby a person under arrest can, if they choose, phone for free legal advice before being questioned by police. The 24-hour-a-day lawyers on the phone are called Brydges counsel.    

In Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC and NWT the service is provided by each province’s Legal Aid. The man with the contract to serve all four jurisdictions is the Saskatoon-born, Victoria lawyer, Ron Dumonceaux. He has contracts with about 25 lawyers throughout the region. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 364 days a year in as many as 112 languages, those lawyers, including Dumonceaux field about 50,000 calls from people under arrest who need immediate legal advice.    

Dumonceaux accepted his first contract in 1992 while he was still in Saskatoon. That initial contract was just for the province of Saskatchewan. He started out with a few other lawyers but for a time he was the only lawyer in the province answering the Brydges Counsel line. “Yeah, I had some long days” he recalls.    

Over time he took on additional contracts in Alberta, British Columbia and NWT. He also joined a practice in Victoria. “It’s relatively easy to do,” he says of the Brydges work “but it’s also relatively easy to screw up." He calculates he has testified more than a hundred times in cases in which questions have been raised relating to the advice given.    

Suzanne Polkosnik, vice president of representational services at Legal Aid Alberta says the Brydges Counsel service is “critically important to providing justice to people who have been arrested and detained”. While Polkosnik says “there is always room for improvement” with any service “we feel people are getting the advice they need, when they need it.”

A version of this story first appeared in Canadian Lawyer in April 2014.


Geoff Ellwand is a Calgary criminal lawyer with an MA in history. A former CBC reporter, he continues to write about the law and history. Geoff is also a member of the CBA Alberta Editorial Committee, and has leant his many talents to guest-editing this edition of Law Matters.