Eleven months after a searching look at how the justice system functions, the ministry鈥檚 own report card shows how much work is left to be done.
It鈥檚 in the form of a service-plan report, which amounts to confession time for each ministry when it comes to their performance goals.
Each ministry compiles a service plan detailing what it plans to accomplish over the year. Then they come up with reports on how they did, with specific pass-fail marks on a host of targets.
The Justice Ministry had a harder time than many others in hitting its numbers.
Under the general heading of 鈥渢imely, accessible and efficient processes and services鈥� the numbers show the court backlog 鈥� despite a declining crime rate and fewer cases 鈥� is still a real issue.
They came close on holding the average number of appearances per concluded case to a target of about six. But they didn鈥檛 quite meet the 77-day target to conclude provincial criminal cases. It was posted at 84.
They set out to hold the median wait for a first order on a family application to 91 days. It was 105.
They wanted to keep the median wait in small-claims cases for a first substantive appearance to 168 days. It was 214 days.
The median small-claims wait to get to trial stage was to be 318 days, but it鈥檚 actually 407.
The ministry did manage some wins, in areas not related to courtroom traffic. They set a target of a maximum 150-day wait to deal with victim-assistance financial claims, and cut that to 70 days. And they bettered the time target for getting disaster-assistance cheques out.
There are no specific data in the report on crime-rate trends because those annual figures came out subsequent to the service-plan report. But they were generally down and have been declining for years.
The ministry also reports on traffic fatalities and injuries. The government was aiming for 2.3 impaired fatalities per 100,000 people. B.C. achieved 1.1, another tribute to the changed impaired-driving regime. The report says the immediate roadside prohibition system reduced the number of impaired-driving cases in the courts by 8,000 since 2010.
Overall traffic fatalities were also kept below the target level, but the traffic injury rate missed the mark.
It was last August that lawyer Geoffrey Cowper鈥檚 report on modernizing and streamlining the criminal justice system was released. Over a period of months, the government responded with two white papers on the topic, then some legislation in the spring to reform the system. There was also a new family law act that took effect this year. It might also contribute to streamlining.
As well, there鈥檚 a move to get traffic tickets out of the court system, as well as an online mediation dispute-resolution system.
All the reform ideas cited above are expected to kick in to some extent in the current year. So it鈥檚 fair to expect some dramatic improvement in the performance measures.
As well, a stronger set of measures is being developed. Considering the scope of the billion-dollar ministry, the ones currently used are a bit weak. More transparency and clearer reporting on whether the system is meeting the targets is expected.
One of the new measurements could involve the kinds of cases. The ministry is putting together a new complexity index to measure one of the often-cited reasons for continued court backlogs: the number of long, complicated criminal cases.
The Cowper report, the subsequent government papers, the legislation and the various reforms all contributed to Justice Minister Suzanne Anton getting a relatively easy ride in defending her spending estimates last week. The system will cost $1.1 billion this year and is expected to hold the line at that level for two more years.
New Democrat critics took the usual line of rapping underspending, particularly in legal aid, which is still well below the level of funding from years gone by.
But the justice minister will have a lot more to answer for next year, if the reforms don鈥檛 start producing obvious results.
