Provincial court cases moving slightly faster By: Katie May Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019

Cases are moving through Manitoba's provincial courts faster and at a higher volume, recent data shows.

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This article was published 12/02/2019 (2146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cases are moving through Manitoba’s provincial courts faster and at a higher volume, recent data shows.

But two years after the Supreme Court set strict timelines for criminal cases, 1,973 cases took longer than 18 months to complete.

According to previously unreleased statistics, Manitoba provincial courts dealt with 48,808 cases in 2017-18 — a nearly six per cent increase in case volume over the previous year. With courts under pressure to reduce delays, those cases were resolved slightly more quickly than in previous years. Across the province, about four per cent of cases took more than 18 months to wrap up, compared with five per cent of cases in 2016-17.

The statistics show provincial-court caseloads increased in every jurisdiction in Manitoba except for Portage la Prairie, which saw 53 fewer cases compared with the previous year.

The numbers are an indication Manitoba has adopted the "cultural changes" on court timelines that the Supreme Court called for in its Jordan decision, said Chris Gamby, spokesman for the Criminal Defence Lawyers Association of Manitoba.

"Speaking with some senior counsel, it has been a significant shift in the way they practice law to be able to do this. It’s like a conveyor belt. So I think maybe the hard part’s over now and this is just a new reality that we’re living in — the conveyor belt is moving a little bit faster, but that’s OK," he said. "That adjustment period is the hard part."

In July 2016, the Supreme Court of Canada released its ground-breaking Jordan decision, which set an 18-month deadline for provincial courts, from the date of arrest to the end of a criminal trial. Manitoba’s court statistics don’t capture the full effect of the Jordan decision — they measure the entire length of a case, not just to the end of a trial, and they include all cases handled by provincial courts, not just criminal cases. Before the Jordan decision, the proportion of cases that spent more than 18 months in provincial court was between six to seven per cent in Winnipeg. Outside of Winnipeg, between four and 10 per cent of cases took longer than 18 months, according to provincial court statistics from 2014-15.

One of the lawyers who took the Jordan case to the Supreme Court said he’s cautious about interpreting court-time data. Tony Paisana, legislation and law reform co-ordinator for the Canadian Bar Association, represented Barrett Jordan in the B.C. case. He said it’s important to remember that just because a case goes beyond the 18-month deadline doesn’t mean it violates the Supreme Court’s rules in that case. Cases can be extended for exceptional circumstances, and any delay caused by defence lawyers doesn’t count toward the Jordan timelines.

“It’s hard to look at those statistics and come to any realistic sense of how many cases are actually in danger (of being thrown out), but that’s not to ignore the fact that court delays are always an issue and we should be striving to make sure that the numbers are as low as reasonably possible," he said.

Paisana said the Jordan decision has "fundamentally altered the criminal justice system from almost every area" and prompted concern about cases being rushed through court without giving lawyers access to proper police and prosecution disclosure and leaving them without enough time to prepare. Gamby echoed those concerns. But both said it’s clear courts are working to become more efficient.

Despite fears that thousands of criminal cases would be thrown out of court if they languished and exceeded the Supreme Court’s deadlines, that hasn’t happened in Manitoba. Only six cases have been stayed because of unreasonable delay in the province. Since the Jordan decision, defence lawyers have launched 85 delay motions seeking stays of proceedings.

Some data in other parts of the country shows fewer of those legal challenges have been brought to court after Jordan than before, Paisana said, adding he tries not to focus on cases being thrown out.

“Once you get lost in the shuffle of someone getting off or otherwise because of delay, what some people fail to appreciate is that the rule is meant to protect the accused because the accused is suffering at a time when they have not been convicted of anything," he said.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay