In 19 years of doing this, I've had one occasion where the Crown was beyond their six months and they approved a charge by indictment. By agreement, we decided to proceed summarily. We decided to forgo the limitation period because we knew we could do it by agreement. That was the only occasion. I do 50 to 100 impaired driving cases a year, so we're talking hundreds and hundreds of cases. How often do they miss the timeline? Almost never. When I had to hand in a paper in university, I was usually writing that paper the night before and that's what we see with police officers, on occasion. It's not every officer. A lot of them will get it in right away.
However, if you extend that time period, all you're going to do is extend it for a longer period of time, and I'll tell you right now the evidence does not get better with more time passing. If you stretch it out to a year, you're just going to have a worse case for the Crown, and you're handing more ammunition to us as defence lawyers because we're just going to put it to those witnesses when we get to 24 months down the road for the trial. Memory fades and you don't remember as well.
You're giving some advantage to defence lawyers. You're doing a great disservice to the people who are accused. All you're doing is putting something off that you're supposed to do correctly in the first place, which is to get your case together and approve a charge, if that's appropriate.