Burnout on the provincial bench

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This article was published 14/11/2024 (331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba law courts have become more efficient, avoiding delays and ensuring cases aren’t tossed as a result, but the workload is taking a toll, the province’s chief judge says.

“We are all frantically trying to keep up with the pace of justice,” provincial court Chief Judge Ryan Rolston told the Free Press Thursday after the province reported an increase in the number of motions that seek a stay of proceedings owing to delays.

The number of delay motions has increased to 37 so far this year, up from 27 in all of 2023. The motions are made when the Crown hasn’t met a set of strict timelines for the handling of criminal cases — 18 months in lower courts and 30 months for higher courts — set out in a landmark 2016 “Jordan ruling” by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Rolston, who was appointed a chief judge in 2023, said there are 39 provincial court judges who sit on a regular basis and that police in Manitoba laid just over 39,000 sets of charges in 2022-23.

“We’re an extremely busy court,” said Rolston, who leads the court that deals with the majority of criminal matters.

“Not all of those go to trial or disposition, but it gives you some sense of how busy we are.”

The provincial court has taken steps to be more efficient and prevented the vast majority of cases from being stayed because of delays, he said.

Since the start of 2023, 409 cases in Canadian courts have been dropped because of delays, the Canadian Press reported last week. During that time in Manitoba, five stays have been granted byand nine are pending, according to the provincial government.

“Delay is always a concern for the provincial court,” Rolston said. “Over the course of the last several of years we’ve been working very hard to reorganize how we serve Manitobans.”

He said the work is getting more complex.

“There’s a lot of focus these days… in the area of sexual assault on ensuring that victims’ rights are respected — which, of course, is a good thing, but it does create motions and evidentiary hurdles that have to be sorted out, and that’s adding to the complexity and the length of some of these trials,” Rolston said.

“What used to be a one-day trial is now sometimes a three- or four-day trial.”

The court has made efforts to schedule consecutive trial days rather than have them spread out over weeks.

“It’s not good for the litigants, it’s not good for the lawyers and it’s certainly not good for the judges,” he said.

Judges no longer preside over remand dockets, in which lawyers reschedule cases that aren’t ready for trial on a week to week basis, Rolston said. The administrative matters have been shifted to judicial justices of the peace, freeing up judges to preside over substantive matters.

The court is also looking at when and where in the province court resources are needed most and reallocating them — most often in the North, he said.

“We’ve been actively working hard to make the courts more accessible and to be able to provide counsel with the dates so we don’t run into Jordan delays,” he said.

“There’s a fairly steep price that we’re finding that we’re paying for the efforts that we’ve made. Our judges are becoming burned out because we’ve created a pace that is very difficult to cope with physically and emotionally, to deal with the volume.

“There has to be a balance that we reach as a society….Sometimes in creating those efficiencies you trim away all of the time for people to catch their breath and that creates a problem.”

Most cases are disposed within four months, one-quarter take nearly 18 months and “not too many” go beyond 18 months, he said, adding his goal is to see trials happen within seven months of a first court appearance to allow for a fair pretrial process while respecting “the people who need these things to be decided quickly.”

“We can’t sacrifice the fairness of the trial process for the sake of speed for the system. If we were to do that, that’s not fair to the accused, it’s not fair to the alleged victims of these crimes,” he said.

“I’m confident that we’ve done everything we can to be as efficient as we can, but I do believe that we need more resources.

At least one more judge would help, he said.

Justice Minister Matt Wiebe said the province is committed to providing the needed resources, and has reduced court clerk vacancies by 69 per cent in Winnipeg and 52 per cent elsewhere in the province.

“We’ve also taken action to ensure we have enough judges, and just last week we appointed a new justice for Thompson,” Wiebe said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to continuing our work with the judiciary to ensure all Manitobans have access to a responsive and fair justice system.”

The provincial government will re-introduce “Keira’s law” next session, he said.

“To ensure that continuing education funding for provincial court judges and justices of the peace on sensitive issues, such as intimate partner violence and coercive control, never lapses.”

Bill 41, the Provincial Court Amendment Act, will require additional mandatory education for judges and is “a good thing,” but one that will require more of the judges’ time, Rolston said.

“We do work very hard on legal education but as you add that mandatory component to the stuff that we’re already doing, that’s a greater toll on our judges because there’s just more to do,” he said.

“I think it’s going to create more burden on the court. We are just at the point now where we are having a tough time keeping up.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca