Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer (Photo: Government of Alberta)

By Emily Keller

Province doubles number of articling students working for Crown prosecutors in rural areas

Feb 22, 2020 | 1:05 PM

The province has announced it has doubled the amount of articling students working for the Crown prosecution service from eight to 16. The students will be coming to different areas of the province, including Grande Prairie.

In November 2019, the province promised to double the amount of articling students working for the Crown to better serve rural communities and areas.

“Quite often, Calgary and Edmonton suck up a lot of the legal talent in the province of Alberta,” said Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer. “but there’s no reason why a young person that’s from Grande Prairie who wants to go to law school shouldn’t have equal opportunity to go home to Grande Prairie.”

“Another part of the program that we’re doing here with expanding our reach of articling students is giving student’s the ability to go back home.”

Minister Schweitzer says the promise to do so was made after he noticed a gap in the number of students being hired provincially.

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“When you take a look at how many articling students the private sector would hire, they hire exponentially more than what we’re hiring in the Government of Alberta, so automatically I’m like, ‘Wait a minute,’ we need to get a better pipeline of students coming in to help make sure we have basically the right level of seniority coming in every year.”

An articling student is someone who has finished law school and takes a few courses with the Law Society. It is a one-year process for an articling student to become a full lawyer, and they usually learn different areas of law, like criminal or civil law.

Next year, the province plans to hire up to 20, said Schweitzer.

The articling students are set to start in the various communities, including Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Slave Lake and Fort Saskatchewan on July 2.