Nunavut lawyer Alison Crowe has been awarded $20,076 in legal costs after successfully challenging an unfair process that kept her off the territory’s criminal legal-aid panel. The court did not order her reinstatement or award compensation for lost income.
In Crowe v. Legal Services Board of Nunavut, 2026 NUCJ 24, dated September 28, 2026, Justice P. Rouleau of the Nunavut Court of Justice fixed costs at half of the $40,152 Crowe sought for full reimbursement. The award includes GST.
The costs ruling followed Alison Crowe v Legal Services Board of Nunavut, 2026 NUCJ 15, dated August 6, 2026. That decision set aside the board’s refusal to reinstate her and sent the matter back for reconsideration after finding she should have been told its concerns and allowed to respond in writing.
A return to legal-aid practice
Crowe had served on the criminal panel for about 12 years before withdrawing when she became a justice of the peace in October 2024. She resigned from that position eight months later, returned to legal practice and sought reinstatement to the panel.
The board considered and rejected her application at two closed meetings in the autumn of 2025. Its brief explanation referred to concerns about interpersonal skills and interactions with staff and judges. Crowe disputed those concerns. The judicial-review ruling resolved the fairness of the process, not whether the concerns established misconduct.
Crowe said legal-aid files had accounted for 80 to 100 per cent of her annual income while she practised in Nunavut. The board disputed her position that she could not continue a criminal-law practice in the territory without that work.
More than a private hiring decision
The board argued that admitting a lawyer to its panel was comparable to hiring an employee or assigning work, and therefore was not a public decision subject to judicial review.
The judge disagreed. Panel appointments are statutory functions that enable self-employed lawyers to deliver publicly funded legal services to people who cannot afford them. There was no employment contract between Crowe and the board, and the legislation provided no appeal mechanism for the refusal to reinstate her.
The court distinguished deciding who can join a panel from the more administrative task of assigning individual files to lawyers already on it.
It also found that Crowe’s circumstances required a level of procedural fairness in the middle of the spectrum. Her long service, short absence to perform another justice-system role and substantial dependence on legal-aid work mattered. So did Nunavut’s limited market for privately funded criminal defence.
That did not entitle her to a guaranteed appointment or a formal hearing. It entitled her to notice of the board’s concerns and an opportunity to make written submissions before it refused reinstatement.
By the time the case reached court, the parties had exchanged the relevant concerns and responses. The judge therefore returned the decision to the board to reconsider that material. He declined to order reinstatement or lost-income damages, noting that Crowe conceded there was no allegation of bad faith.
Why costs were set at half the claim
In the later costs ruling, the board argued that each side should bear its own expenses because Crowe had not obtained all the relief she wanted and the proceedings clarified the applicable fairness obligations.
The judge held that Crowe was entitled to costs: she had been denied procedural fairness and had little alternative to judicial review. Failing to obtain a direct reinstatement order did not erase her success.
Full or substantial reimbursement was not justified, however. All but one of her settlement offers depended on reinstatement, a remedy she did not obtain. The remaining offer had little practical effect under the court’s settlement-offer rule because virtually all her costs had already been incurred.
The board also challenged her lawyer’s hours. The judge considered the time somewhat high and noted that substantial material addressed the merits in pursuit of reinstatement. But he accepted the hours and rates claimed rather than cutting the hours in half. He instead applied a lower-end party-and-party recovery rate of 50 per cent, producing the $20,076 award.
The combined result was a fresh decision-making process and partial recovery of litigation expenses—not a judicial appointment to the legal-aid panel.
