Court backlog growing and courtrooms sit empty for hours every day: auditor

TORONTO — Ontario’s auditor general painted a grim picture Wednesday of a plodding justice system, plagued by worsening delays and outdated technology.

Bonnie Lysyk said in her annual report that a backlog of criminal cases in the court system is growing while courtrooms only operate for an average of 2.8 hours a day, and some child protection cases are going unresolved for more than three years.

The report looked at various aspects of the justice system, including criminal and family courts, jails and detention centres, as well as coroners’ operations.

It found that last year, 19 of the 23 top-billing coroners — who are also physicians — performed death investigations on people who had been their patients in the previous five years. Fifteen of them had seen those patients within the preceding year, which raises conflict of interest concerns, Lysyk wrote. There were no autopsies performed in about half of those cases, she found.

“These cases are concerning because there is a risk that the truth about a death will not come to light if the physician’s treatment decisions while the patient was alive could have contributed to the patient’s death,” she wrote.

The report also said that the Office of the Chief Coroner doesn’t have procedures for inventories of bodies. Some have been found in the wrong cooler and in one case a pathologist performed an autopsy on the wrong body, the auditor found.

Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said the chief coroner and the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service have accepted all of the auditor’s recommendations on how to improve their systems.

In the courts, Lysyk found the number of criminal cases awaiting resolution grew by 27 per cent to about 114,000 cases, while the average number of days needed to deal with a case grew by nine per cent.

In the family courts, about one-quarter of the 5,249 child protection cases had been pending for more than 18 months; some for three years.