QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Justice
Outsourced Legal Services
May 28, 2026
Minister, how are John and Sally?
For those of you who don’t know, Mike’s wife is my sister’s godmother, and we’ve known each other for a very long time. I watched The Fox and the Hound in his basement many years ago.
They’re doing great. Thank you.
Order. Back to the question, Senator MacDonald.
It was when he was in diapers.
Minister, recent analysis by The Hill Times shows that Department of Justice spending on outsourced legal services has more than doubled since 2015, reaching over $36 million this year and exceeding $237 million over the past decade. At the same time, minister, over 1,000 in-house legal positions remain vacant in the department.
Minister, how does the government justify spending millions of dollars on outsourced legal services while funded internal positions sit empty in the department?
It’s a good question, and I understand it seems like a logical inconsistency in the way that you pitched it. However, when I dug into the issue, I found it to be consistent with my own approach to how these issues ought to be managed.
The permanently funded positions within the Department of Justice help us keep up with the core demand and typically reflect the asks that we have from our client departments to provide legal services to them on an ongoing basis. Conversely, when we use shorter-term contracts to engage external counsel, it typically engages individuals who have some specific expertise. Sometimes, it’s a history of appearing before the Supreme Court of Canada. Other times, it’s deep policy expertise in a particular area, given a career that a person may have spent becoming a national leading expert.
My own view is it’s appropriate to engage external counsel in those kinds of instances, and that’s how I manage the affairs of the department when we have decisions to make about whether and to what extent we should engage external counsel on a given matter.
Minister, are you able to provide the Senate with an up-to-date figure for the outsourced legal spending for 2025-26? Can you give the Senate any idea of when the 1,000-plus legal vacancies will be filled over the next little while?
First, I don’t have the figures in front of me. I expect, as part of the annual reporting on the expenditures of the department, that would all be public information.
I’m sorry, but what was the second part of your question again, senator?
Ostensibly, there are over 1,000 positions that remain unfilled.
Certainly. The timing would, obviously, depend on the specific post that individual demands would place on the department and the opportunity to find the appropriate candidate for the job.
The number of staff that we will bring into the department will also be a reflection of the demand that the department is facing from its client departments. We often staff up to meet an increasing demand that may be coming through government departments, but it’s not as though there’s a specific date for each one of these positions to be filled. That would depend on the individual position and the candidates available to do the job.
