Information sharing could help court backlog, Senate committee hears
Government agencies need to improve information sharing with each other to keep mentally ill people out of the courts and corrections systems, a Senate committee looking into court delays heard in Saskatoon Thursday.
“We have too many people going into the criminal justice system that have no business being there ... Their presence is a reflection of the failure of other parts of the system to adequately serve their needs,” said Norm Taylor, an expert on the HUB model of social services and police partnerships that provide rapid interventions for people at risk.
Senator Bob Runciman, chair of the committee on legal and constitutional affairs, agrees but said no one has been able to show evidence of the links between people poorly served by mental health and social services systems and the backlog of cases in the court system, which is the focus of the committee’s ongoing cross-country tour.
Runciman said he’s frustrated with a lack of consistency from province to province in gathering information to find out what works best for speeding up the system.
Experts point to restorative justice measures, such as specialized domestic violence courts intended to divert family problems to counselling and other supports, but no one has been able to say what the recidivism rate is in such cases, he said.
“They don’t have that data even though they’ve been in operation for eight years,” Runciman said.
“We simply don’t have the data collection ... It’s hard to measure how useful (they are),” he said.
Taylor says plenty of data is gathered by human services agencies working in areas such as education, health care, mental health, housing and policing, but they operate in silos, unable to use each other’s information to best serve the clients, he said.
“The mechanisms for linking it is not developed,” he said.
Taylor’s company examined 24 pieces of legislation and found that all of them allow sharing of information between government agencies in circumstances where an individual’s well-being is at serious risk.
Too many front-line professionals don’t understand the legislation well enough to know when they can share information, so they err on the side of caution, he said.
Researchers in Saskatchewan and Ontario have worked with privacy commissioners and consulted privacy experts to arrive at a set of disciplines that prove workers can share information without violating privacy laws.
Those principles can be used to allow public policy-makers to gather evidence about what interventions really do divert people from the court system, he said.
Runciman said he looks forward to hearing from Canada’s privacy commissioner as the committee continues its work.
The Senate Committee heard from lawyers, university professors and representatives of the Saskatchewan government, the police and non-governmental organizations.
In August, the committee released an interim report on court delays in the criminal justice system in Canada. In this report, the committee made recommendations to fill 51 federal judicial vacancies, modernize the court system and improve case management practices.
The committee will release a final report in March 2017.
They don’t have that data even though they’ve been in operation for eight years.