18 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 1 JANUARY 2021
fulfill its constitutional mandate in accordance with the existing rules.
When that system is overburdened by conditions beyond its control (or by
rules it is required to follow), the judicial system can no longer deliver in a
timely manner, or as much as it did before.
The second is the cost of accessing justice (i.e., accessing a means of
resolving disputes in accordance with the law). While it might be said that
access to justice is largely free (except for nominal court fees), access to the
legal services necessary to navigate the judicial system is not. Judicial decision
making as a means of resolving disputes is increasingly inaccessible,
primarily because it is more time-consuming and therefore more expensive.
That is where Justice Abella’s and former chief justice McLachlin’s
criticisms are centered. This perspective ties into the workload issues
referred to above: the fact that legal proceedings are generally taking longer
than they used to limits the judicial system’s ability to resolve disputes and
costs litigants more.
The statistics bear this out. In the B.C. Supreme Court’s 2006 Annual
Report, Chief Justice Brenner produced a table showing that the number of
trials heard in the Vancouver Law Courts fell from 758 in 1997 to 374 in 2006
(a 51 per cent reduction over that decade).3 Long applications followed the
opposite trend and increased dramatically from 406 in 1997 to 929 in 2006 (a
228 per cent increase over that period). In the 2006 to 2019 period, the situation
stabilized somewhat. Between 2006 and 2014, the number of trials
heard in the Vancouver Law Courts hovered around 400 before declining to
344 in 2015,4 326 in 2016,5 307 in 20176 and 298 in 2018.7 The number of trials
moved back up to 387 trials in 2019.8 Even if a temporary spike, 2019 saw
only 51 per cent of the number of trials held in the Vancouver Law Courts in
1997. Between 2006 and 2019, the number of long applications heard in the
Vancouver Law Courts hovered around 1,100 with a high of 1,426 in 2018.9
In short, the B.C. Supreme Court now hears fewer trials and more long
applications than in the early 1990s, even though its caseload (as measured
by new filings) has remained relatively stagnant. There were 76,760 new filings
in 199210 and 79,890 in 2018,11 rising substantially to 84,968 in 2019.12 In
the interim, new filings had plunged to a low of 61,105 in 2007 before
rebounding. In fact, the number of new filings decreased up to 2007 and then
remained in the 60,000–70,000 range until 2015 and only resumed 1992 levels
in 2016 to 2019. Thus, despite a 23 per cent increase in population
between 2002 and 2019, annual new filings declined and then only recently
returned to 1992 levels.
One significant development in the area of new filings has been the dramatic
and persistent drop in new criminal filings. There were between