Province gets poor marks in justice system rankings
Province ‘significantly underperforms’ most of its counterparts, think-tank says
B.C.’s justice system ranks 10th out of 13 Canadian provinces and territories in a “justice report card” published today by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
The Ottawa-based think-tank gave B.C.’s justice system an overall grade of C+, ahead of only Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and Yukon.
The province’s system “significantly underperforms” that of most other provinces on many measures, says the report by Benjamin Perrin, a University of B.C. law professor, and Richard Audas, a health statistics professor at Memorial University.
Perrin and Audas drew on Statistics Canada data and applied statistical methods to assess each province and territory’s criminal justice system on five areas: public safety, support for victims, costs and resources, fairness and access to justice, and efficiency.
In 2016, B.C. scored eighth place. The drop to 10th in the 2017 rankings was due to a “relative decline in public safety, and fairness and access to justice in the province,” said the report.
On the public safety measure, B.C. had the lowest violent crime clearance rate in Canada at 52 per cent. The clearance rate is the proportion of criminal cases solved by police, usually defined by a charge being laid.
In comparison, New Brunswick’s rate is 68 per cent, the highest of all provinces, and Nunavut had 87 per cent, the highest in Canada. The national average is 62 per cent.
B.C. also did the worst in tackling non-violent crime, which has a clearance rate of 20 per cent compared to 29 per cent nationally.
The province has one of the highest property crime rates among all provinces at 5,000 per 100,000 population. Only Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan performed worse.
It also has the highest rates of breach of probation in Canada and relatively high rates of failure to comply with court orders.
The report found public perception of the police in B.C. is below average, specifically when it comes to enforcing the law, ensuring public safety, satisfaction with public safety, being fair and responding promptly.
On the fairness and access to justice measure, where B.C. scored a D, the report found confidence in the police and courts in B.C. ranked below average.
The province has one of the most disproportionately high levels of Indigenous incarceration of anywhere in Canada, it said, and also has relatively low criminal legal aid expenditures per 1,000 crimes.
While the report detailed several weaknesses, it highlighted a few strengths. Among them was the province’s low rate of people who fail to appear in court or are unlawfully at large.
Another strength, according to the authors, was policing efficiency. The province has “more Criminal Code incidents per police officer than is typical in Canada, and relatively fewer accused persons on remand per 1,000 crimes than average.”
The median length of criminal cases in B.C. is 100 days, less than the national average of 127. Prince Edward Island got top marks in this category with its cases lasting a median of 37 days, while Quebec did worst with a median of 228 days. Overall, Prince Edward Island scored the highest, while Ontario ranked fourth and Quebec and Alberta took sixth and seventh.