Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.
“If you step forward inside that place, you’re flipping a coin — whether you’re going to get justice that day or not,” he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.
Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.
That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.
When you think about it, triage in medicine is also not an ideal solution. Ideally, in both medicine and law, the system would have enough capacity to deal with everyone in strict first-in-first-out order without anyone being harmed. In the absence of that capacity, we have to decide which cases to look at first somehow, and FIFO doesn’t appear to be the best basis for making that decision.
We need more judges too, but even if we were to somehow force legislators to select them this instant, some cases would end up getting dropped before the backlog got caught up. I’d much prefer that they were things like solicitation, small-amount drug posession, and minor traffic violations—not petty theft if we can help it, since that isn’t a victimless crime, but I’d nevertheless rather have ten petty theft cases dropped than one assault case that landed someone in the hospital.
It’s a flawed solution for a flawed world.