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Accused in Tori Stafford murder in court
Her lawyer, Jeanine Leroy, says there is a “substantial amount of evidence” to review before the case goes any further.
From epidemic to epidemic
Ontario nurses seek to revive SARS lawsuit
It says the May ruling leaves nurses at risk as they care for patients during the current swine flu pandemic, as well as other outbreaks of potentially deadly diseases.
The finger as a traffic offence
One-digit salute earns driver second ticket
After he received the ticket and began to pull away, the driver raised his hand and flashed an obscene gesture toward provincial police Const. Bettina Schwarze.
Do you think the officer did the right thing?
Lucrative careers: fare collection
An article in the Star about stealing by TTC station collectors led us to a fascinating publication: Public Sector Salary Disclosure 2009. It lists Ontario public sector employees with salaries over $100,000 per year. Look at Municipalities and Services, and then search for “Station Collector.” And we were wondering whose luxury cars were often parked on subway station grounds.
UPDATE: and check out this long list of Ontario public sector organizations with NO salaries of $100,000 or more to disclose. It includes small town hospitals, women’s shelters, mental health, disability, immigrant, aboriginal, and other social services organizations, retirement homes, hospices, sexual assault survivors centres, etc.
Children and the state
‘Where’s Ontario’s humanity?’ mom asks
More on jury background checks
Ontario reveals juries given secret background checks
More on Legal Aid Boycott
Legal aid boycott grows over paltry paycheques
Here is our previous post on the boycott.
When lawyers go on strike
Can lawyers go on strike? You’d think no, not if they have their own practices. But effectively that’s what many defence lawyers in Ontario are up to these days. Maybe they don’t make as many headlines as garbage collectors in Windsor or Toronto who walked off their jobs around the same time. But the consequences of their action can be more far-reaching than overflowing trash bins on Toronto streets. And unlike unions, defence lawyers don’t have the advantage of labour mediation.
It all started with a Criminal Lawyers’ Association Board resolution on June 1, 2009. In it, the CLA requested “senior Toronto members not to take legal aid certificates in Guns & Gangs and homicide cases.” According to the CLA website, the “purpose of this public resolution is to highlight the notorious imbalance in the system between police and prosecution compensation and resources and legal aid defence counsel compensation resources.” Read the letter [pdf] from Frank Addario, the President of the CLA, to Chris Bentley, Attorney General of Ontario for background information and statistics.
The issue here is simple. Ontario Crown lawyers received a 57% pay increase between 1997 and 2007. Legal aid lawyers got a 15% increase since twice as long ago. Prices went up 75% in the same period. Yes, it means that in real terms legal-aid pay went down a lot. Many defence lawyers effectively work on legal-aid files pro bono part of the time. A criminal lawyer who mentors me said Legal Aid only paid for two hours for the bail hearing we did last week. He spent a day working on it. The issue is simple. It’s the balance of power between the Crown and the accused.
Justice means the state accusing you of a crime does not have preponderantly more resources on your case than you do. We are all entitled to justice. Who will disagree with this? Are we, as a society, prepared to pay for justice for all? Even for the criminally accused? Legal Aid’s budget in Ontario was $309 million in 2006. Is it too much? Too little? It clearly translates into too little on a case-by-case basis. And we as a society, at least in Ontario, have been reluctant to open our pockets wider. Today, defence lawyers resort to shock tactics to attract our attention to this issue. It’s about justice for all, don’t you think?
(post sponsored by advicescene.com)
Ontario Ombudsman
The office of Ontario Ombudsman is on Twitter and Facebook. The Ombudsman is a pretty unique independent oversight officer accountable directly to the provincial legislature. He investigates people’s complaints under the authority granted by the Ombudsman Act.
Add or follow the Ombudsman. It’s cool to see government trying to get on the social media bandwagon.
40% of Ontario Prosecutions Fail Before Trial
According to the National Post, the criminal justice system in Ontario is an absolute mess.
Ontario has the highest rate of failed prosecutions in Canada.
In this province, approximately 40% of criminal cases are withdrawn, stayed, or dismissed, often before the trial even begins.
To say nothing of the impact on the improperly accused person, the cost to the taxpayer – for wasteful police investigations, fruitless prosecutions, and court costs – is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why?
There are a few reasons which the National Post and others have identified:
- Lack of collaboration between Crown Attorneys and the police. For the vast majority of crimes in Ontario, the police make the decision on whether to lay a charge. The police are not in the best position to decide whether the charge will stick in court; Crowns are. In other provinces, the Crown acts in a screening capacity to decide whether a charge should be laid in the first place.
- Lack of discretion on the part of Crown Attorneys. The Crown policy manual requires Crowns to drop charges where there is no reasonable prospect of conviction or where pursuing the matter would not be in the public interest. Thus, Crowns are required to act in a quasi-judicial role in deciding whether to press the prosecution. Unfortunately, junior Crowns are often unwilling to take initiative and withdraw a charge for fear of making a mistake and drawing the ire of their superiors.
- Lack of ownership of files. Most criminal files are shuffled around from one Crown attorney to the next until the time of trial. This creates a great deal of administrative waste, because all of the Crowns that will come into contact with the file will have to take time to fully familiarize themselves with it. Worse yet, when Crowns feel that they don’t have ownership of a file, they are unwilling to make tough decisions to withdraw a charge. Lacking a comprehensive knowledge of the case and the accused, it’s easier to just do nothing and allow the file to pass to someone else.
Having identified some of the causes, it’s clear that relatively simple changes could be made to the criminal justice system to significantly cut down on the number of failed prosecutions.
Huge Changes to Ontario Civil Procedure
The McGuinty government has today announced that it will be making significant changes to the civil justice system in Ontario.
The changes arise in response to Justice Osborne’s recommendations for civil procedure reforms. The government initially commissioned the report to find ways to improve access to justice and speed up the processing of civil matters.
An extensive list of the recommendations of the Civil Justice Reform Project can be found here. The abridged highlights are also published in the 2008-2009 Ontario Annual Practice – a book which just about every civil procedure student and civil lawyer owns – at page vi.
Just over a year later, the government has agreed to implement 25 major reforms to the rules of Ontario’s civil courts, including the following major recommendations:
- An increase in the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court from $10,000 to $25,000.
- An increase in the Rule 76 Simplified Procedure limit from $50,000 to $100,000.
- Parties will be allowed up to two hours of oral discovery for Rule 76 actions.
- Each party will be limited to a total of seven hours of pre-trial Examination for Discovery (unless the parties consent or the court orders otherwise.)
- New rules of summary judgment that make it less likely for costs to be awarded against the party that loses the motion. These costs awards acted as a disincentive to bring a summary judgment motion.
- A judge can now order a “mini-trial” to hear oral evidence on a summary judgment motion.
- The civil court rules will now contain a general principle of proportionality to guide their interpretation. The time and expense devoted to any proceeding must now reflect what is at stake. Cases that are straight forward and of lower value should not take as long or cost as much as large, complex cases.
Mr. Justice Osborne had the following to say about today’s announcement:
“By acting on my recommendations, the Attorney General is reducing cost and delay for individuals and businesses who use our civil courts. The reforms reflect the need for proportionality in our civil justice, which means that straightforward, lower value cases should not take as long or cost as much as large, complex cases.”
We have previously covered some of the Attorney General’s criminal law reforms on this website.
Kudos to the Hon. Mr. Chris Bentley for implementing these sweeping reforms that promise the speedier and cheaper resolution of cases.
It’s Official: E-Laws Printouts are Good Law!
Mr. Wisdom has pointed out how reliant we soon-to-be-lawyers are on technology. I, like him, cannot imagine living without CanLII, electronic library catalogs, and e-laws.
However, there has always been an undercurrent of resistance to technology from the old school bar that somehow – incredibly in my eyes – manages to get by just fine without electronic legal resources. For a long time, printouts of electronic case law and legislation have not been acceptable for use in court.
The general rule was that printouts are unacceptable or at least frowned-upon, especially in Superior Court proceedings, though some leeway was occasionally granted in the interests of expedience.
I am extremely happy today to report that the general rule is changing.
Ontario was the first province to begin publishing its laws online. That happened back in 2001 with the launch of e-laws. That was a progressive move to help make the law more accessible to the public, and indeed, to help keep lawyers up to date on changes that could take time to get published in print.
As of November 30, 2008, the government has gone a step further.
According to a MAG press release, copies of regulations and statutes published on e-laws will now be an official source of law.
Both of the following are official:
- An on-screen display of a statute or regulation viewed on, or downloaded from, the e-Laws website
- A printout of a statute or regulation viewed on, or downloaded from, the e-Laws website.
According to Ontario’s Attorney General, Chris Bentley (a fellow Londoner):
“E-Laws provides Ontarians with easy access to Ontario’s laws. Making e-Laws an official source of law recognizes the reality of today’s modern technological environment. Eliminating our reliance on printed publications not only makes the law more accessible but does so in a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way.”
These changes were made pursuant to a new regulation under the Legislation Act, 2006, [S.O. 2006, c. 21, Sch. F].
Ironically, the regulation (presumably under s. 41(1)) is too new to have been published on the E-Laws website just yet. I haven’t been able to find it!
