We have pretrial conferences in all criminal trials that are going to be three days or more. Generally speaking, there is cooperation as between the two individuals, or it might be three defence counsel and one prosecutor. Sometimes when you add another defence counsel, then the complications arise.
It is a lot better now than it has been in the past. I think that lawyers, generally speaking, feel they have an obligation to ensure that these matters are proceeded with as expeditiously as possible and within a reasonable time.
So a lot is accomplished in a pretrial conference: no, you don't have to call that witness; just read in his statement, because I'm not going to cross-examine him anyway.
A lot of things can be done at these pretrial conferences. Pretrial conferences are very effective. One of the problems is that the crown doesn't have the resources to conduct them in all occasions, or sometimes they have to send someone who's not going to handle the trial, so it's not effective. It's a staffing problem that causes that problem. At the very same time, we are a little bit proactive: Can we resolve this case? He's been charged with assault causing bodily harm. It was a black eye. Can we bring this down? Can we save a couple of days?
We triple-book criminal trials in Edmonton. Some are adjourned, some plead guilty, and yet we have enough judges and all the trials are heard notwithstanding the fact that we triple-book. We have eight judges, and we have about 24 cases that we book each day. We weed them out through pretrial conferences or whatever it might be. Very seldom do we have to send anybody home. I think it was twice last year. They got a trial the next week if they wanted or when it was convenient to them.
We've done very well by what we call these kind of reforms, which are our own initiatives: the effective use of pretrial conferences and the criminal appearance court, and what we call mini-trials. Those mostly are civil cases, but the odd time they have also been criminal cases.
I think that the bar now is cooperating. There used to be a time when it was such an adversarial position that they adopted, they wouldn't even speak to each other until they got before the court. Judges would then start court a little early and ask if they'd spoken to each other about this. The answer would be no.
We're in a more civilized era now than we used to be. The adversarial system also demands that there be cooperation.