Justice delayed, as they say, is justice denied.
That’s why three years ago the Supreme Court of Canada lit a fire under governments across the country that were letting the country’s court systems go to rot through underfunding.
To encourage investment, it imposed deadlines of 18 months for cases before provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts.
But if you think that persuaded the government of Ontario to ensure a backlog of criminal cases would not be tossed out of court because of delays, you’d be wrong.
In her 2019 annual report, the province’s auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, painted a picture of a court system that is still operating in the mid-20th century.
That’s grossly unfair to those caught up in it, as well as costly for the taxpayers who fund it.
Lysyk found, for example, that 96 per cent of the 2.5 million documents filed in Ontario courts in 2018-19 were on paper and courtrooms were being underused because of inefficient scheduling.
Little surprise, then, that she also found the backlog of criminal cases awaiting conclusion had increased by about 27 per cent, or about 114,000 cases, between 2014 and 2018.
It wasn’t any better on the family court side. There, Lysyk found that 1,200 child protection cases had been pending in the system for more than 18 months.
That is beyond the timeline prescribed by law to deal with these cases, never mind that children may be endangered or unnecessarily separated from family members because of the delays.
It’s true the Ford government inherited this system. But in a year and a half it has done nothing to make matters better.
Attorney General Doug Downey, for example, says he is “actively working on legislative proposals to improve the operations of our courts.” But he would not or could not tell the legislature what those actions might be.
So far, though, instead of investing in the province’s legal system as the Supreme Court had hoped, the Ford government has only acted to make matters worse by imposing funding cuts.
Last April, for example, former AG Caroline Mulroney slashed the province’s legal aid budget by 30 per cent. At the time she claimed the move would ensure that “lower-income Ontarians continue to have access to the justice they need.”
Downey has since backed her up on that, though he did reverse a plan for further cuts in the new year.
That’s despite the fact that her comments made so little sense that the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Richard Wagner, set aside his customary reluctance to comment on government matters and said this: “I think legal aid is essential… to make sure that the justice system is strong and fair.
“It’s also a smart investment,” he added.
Indeed. Without legal aid, more people will end up representing themselves in court. And that means cases take longer to adjudicate and cost taxpayers more.
So, too, do new trials in cases where a person without adequate representation is found guilty and a higher court overturns the verdict and orders a new trial.
Lysyk also pointed out the failure to modernize court proceedings actually costs taxpayers money by preventing the government from “realizing potential cost savings.”
How much that might be, she couldn’t say. That’s because she was met with so many roadblocks in her attempts to audit the court system that she could not properly measure how effective it is or definitively identify where potential cost savings might lie.
A fair court system is a pillar of democracy. But right now, Ontario’s auditor general cannot make head nor tails of how it operates. How, then, can Downey expect Ontarians to trust it — or him?
His wait-and-see attitude isn’t good enough. He must tell Ontarians exactly what he is planning to do to improve the system.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2020/01/02/the-ford-government-should-invest-in-ontarios-outmoded-courts.html
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