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Similarly, if judgments take longer to issue because the priority is to have
a judge available for as many hearings as possible, thereby reducing time
available for reserve judgment writing, then an increase in time to issue reasons
may be reflective of a balancing of competing priorities within the
judicial administration. The relative changes in available judicial person
hours for in-court work versus judgment writing is not a metric that was collected
or analyzed for this article but would be a worthy subject for future
study. Consider: If a judge delays writing a decision in a matter on reserve
in order to hear and give oral reasons on another matter, has there been a
net delay in the administration of justice?
Although it is tempting to speculate about the possible causes of the
trends identified in this article, it is beyond the scope of the present exercise.
The hope is that the empirical data collected and presented through
this article goes some way towards informing the conversation on access to
justice going forward.
ENDNOTES
1. Consider, for example, public remarks by the past
two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada
(Chief Justice McLachlin, “The Legal Profession in the
21st Century” (14 August 2015); Chief Justice Wagner,
“Access to Justice: A Societal Imperative” (4
October 2018)), as well as those by the Chief Justices
of both the BC Court of Appeal (Chief Justice Bauman,
“Access to Justice in Family Law” (12 September
2017); “Separate but Cohesive: Navigating the
Separation of Powers in Promoting Access to Justice”
(28 May 2017); “Why Access to Justice for Children
Matters” (11 May 2017); “Pick up the Pace? What
Judges Do in a Day” (18 December 2016)) and the
BC Supreme Court (2019 Annual Report at 1), as
well as by British Columbia’s Attorney General David
Eby (“Attorney General’s Statement on Access to Justice
Week” (30 September 2018)).
2. See Roderick A Macdonald, “Access to Justice in
Canada Today: Scope, Scale and Ambitions” in Julia
Bass, WA Bogart & Frederick A Zemans, eds, Access
to Justice for a New Century: The Way Forward
(Toronto: Law Society of Upper Canada, 2005) at
26–29 (including delay as an “objective” barrier to
achieving access to justice).
3. The term “written” is employed deliberately, to capture
the widest description of published, unpublished,
reported and unreported judicial decisions.
Before about 2000, there was a material distinction
between published and unpublished decisions. Published
judgments were the ones selected for publication
by the commercial publishers such as the DLRs,
BCLRs, WWRs, etc. Unpublished judgments were
also reasoned judgments but were deemed not sufficiently
important to publish by the commercial publishers,
sometimes wrongly. Though it might be hard
at times to locate unpublished judgments, they did
circulate, and copies could be found at the courthouse
library and registry. This article includes both
published and unpublished judgments so long as
they were eventually added into the LexisNexis database
service (which includes cases without a traditional
reporter citation as well as other written
decisions) or issued with a neutral citation and made
available by the BC courts. LexisNexis was chosen as
the principal data source because it had the most
available decisions in the most consistent format.
4. These years were chosen based on availability of
data and apparent representativeness for an inquiry
of the present scope.
5. See e.g. the comments in Western Larch Limited v Di
Poce Management Limited, 2012 ONSC 7014 at
paras 269–77.
6. Pace Ronald Dworkin and Duncan Kennedy.
7. Tracey Tyler, “Toronto Woman Waiting Since Last
Century for Judge’s Decision in Child Custody Case”,
Toronto Star (17 October 2011), online: <www.the
star.com/news/crime/2011/10/17/toronto_woman
_waiting_since_last_century_for_judges_decision_in
_child_custody_case.html>. The article also refers to
delays in other matters of three years (a ruling on
whether a judge had been misled about a journalist’s
role in an RCMP investigation), 29 months (a ruling
on legal costs in child support cases) and 25 months
(an acquittal on weapons offences).
8. 2012 BCSC 1006 (hearing concluded on July 17,
2008; reasons for judgment issued on July 9, 2012).
See also the nearly two-year delay in BNSF Railway
Company v Teck Metals Ltd, 2020 BCSC 1133.
9. Available online through the Lexum Supreme Court
of Canada collection: <scc-csc.lexum.com>.
10. See <www.courts.gov.bc.ca>.
11. Where paragraphs were not indicated by number,
they were manually counted. The data were not collected
by reference to neutral citations because
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