1,400 COURT CASES IN JEOPARDY
Jordan decision puts pressure on Alberta’s beleaguered legal system
More than 1,400 cases before Alberta’s courts could be at risk of being dismissed for violating new time guidelines set out by the Supreme Court of Canada.
New information from Alberta Justice shows that 209 cases in Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench involving serious and violent crimes are among the hundreds in the province’s courts as of April 27 that could be affected by the Supreme Court’s monumental Jordan decision.
“The numbers are definitely a concern when we look at them, but I think we need to focus on the number of actual cases that are going to be a problem as opposed to the numbers of cases that may be a problem,” Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley said Friday.
For a Jordan application to be successful, the delays have to be entirely attributable to the Crown and the justice system and not the accused, the minister said, speaking over the phone from Calgary.
Fifteen per cent of the active Queen’s Bench cases, typically dealing with the most serious offences, have been on the docket longer than the 30-month mark outlined in the Jordan decision. Of the 1,590 cases, 245 were beyond the 30-month mark for going to trial.
On the provincial court side, where the Supreme Court ruled an 18-month time limit is a reasonable time frame for a trial to begin, 1,208 out of 30,974 cases were past the guideline. That accounts for nearly four per cent of the total.
The 2016 Jordan decision — with its specific time frames for reasonable limits on how long an accused can wait for trial without being at risk of violating his or her Charter rights — has put tremendous pressure on courts across the country.
When a case passes the time limit, the accused can make a so-called “Jordan application.”
The backup in Alberta’s courts has built up over a long time and the province can’t fix it alone, Ganley said.
The minister is hopeful for more federal government judicial appointments, particularly to Court of Queen’s Bench, where she said a “bottleneck” has been created by a shortage of superior court justices.
The province created nine additional Court of Queen’s Bench positions in 2016. Several have already been filled by federal government, with the latest appointment of Alberta Human Rights Commission lawyer Janice Ashcroft to the bench in Calgary announced Friday.
But the association that represents the province’s Crown prosecutors said that more hires and resources are needed across the entire justice system.
“Unless the number of Queen’s Bench justices and the resourcing for prosecutions and legal aid are increased, there will be more successful Jordan applications in Alberta,” Alberta Crown Attorneys’ Association president James Picard said in an email Friday.
The association has criticized the government’s implementation of a “triage” policy that was implemented in the spring that is supposed to be used to determine which cases can be stayed, or resolved, as a way of addressing some of the backlog.
Picard said under the policy, prosecutors are abandoning “significant” prosecutions because of the continued lack of resources.
Ganley said Friday that the triage policy remains in place, and was necessary to make sure cases that affect public safety were being prioritized. She added that the hiring announced ahead of the province’s 2017 budget to fill some prosecutor and court staff vacancies across the province is still being completed.
Defendants across Alberta have filed 107 Jordan applications between Oct. 25 and June 22 according to the province. Of those, 22 are pending, 24 have been dismissed and seven have been granted, although the Crown is appealing one of the decisions.
Another 20 cases with Jordan applications were resolved, including nine where the Crown stayed charges and 25 where the application was abandoned by the defence.
The numbers shared with the Journal on Friday show that most active cases in both courts are below the time limits — 92 per cent of provincial court cases have been active for less than 15 months and 67 per cent of Court of Queen’s Bench matters are sitting at less than 24 months.
However, nearly 1,300 provincial cases were approaching the limit, sitting between 15 and 18 months, and 282 cases on the Queen’s Bench side were past 24 months, but still six months shy of reaching the Jordan threshold.