Good evening, everyone.
I'm Ursula Hendel, and I'm the president of the Association of Justice Counsel. It is always a pleasure to appear in committee, but particularly so for me today, because the issue of delay in the criminal justice system is one of extreme importance to me and my membership.
By way of background, the association represents the 2,600 lawyers who work for the federal government. That includes the legislative drafters who prepared the bill, the criminal law policy sector lawyers who testified in front of you last Monday, and also all of the prosecutors who work for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. The federal prosecutors have responsibility for human trafficking, terrorism and organized crime prosecutions. We're Criminal Code prosecutors in Canada's north. We do environmental pollution and tax evasion, and the bread and butter of our work is drug prosecutions throughout Canada.
I told the chair I'd been listening to the testimony of all the witnesses—I've also read all of the bill—and I was impressed by the number of defence counsel who came before you to speak so passionately on issues they care very much about. Like them, for many of us, prosecutions is a calling. We are deeply committed to the system. It's not a job or a paycheque, and we are highly committed to it. We consider ourselves to be heavily invested.
We're very concerned about the issue of delay. You've heard from victims of violence, who spoke about and reminded us how important it is for their needs not to fall through the cracks in a stressed out system. You also heard a story about a young woman who was on bail conditions that prevented her from accessing the treatment centre that was at the very underpinning of her criminality and was the very hope for her success. That shouldn't happen. It doesn't happen because lawyers and judges are mean or incompetent. It happens because we don't have enough resources to do our jobs properly.
We had another warning—maybe a final warning—from the Supreme Court of Canada about delay in the criminal justice system a little more than two years ago. Since that time, some provincial attorneys general have taken immediate steps and hired additional prosecutors and judges. However, the federal government didn't follow suit, and there were no new resources for federal prosecutors.
A number of you in this committee expressed concerns last year about resourcing for federal prosecutors and the adequacy of resourcing for them. That is a concern I share. I'm sorry to report that things haven't improved since then. They've gotten worse. This year, in 2018, the PPSC has an anticipated budget shortfall and has accordingly required most regional offices to cut their operating budgets by 7.5%. We are being asked to do more with less.
We had a lot of hopes that the bill was going to provide us with some relief, because we're not getting any on the resourcing front. I listened intently, and there were three things that were said to cumulatively reduce delay. Those were the preliminary inquiry changes, hybridization and the administration of justice offence measures.
You've heard a lot about the preliminary inquiry, and what is striking is the near unanimity of the messaging. We're on opposite sides of an adversarial system, and it's not common for prosecutors and defence counsel to agree on very many issues of criminal justice policy. It's therefore quite striking that those of us who are on the front line are fairly universally of the view that the preliminary inquiry reforms are not going to fix the delay problem.
That's true for hybridization as well, but I just want to tell you that for federal prosecutors in particular, even if you aren't convinced that it's true, there's very little relief for us in this bill. The offences that we prosecute mostly—terrorism, human trafficking and major drug trafficking—are offences that carry life sentence maximums. The changes to hybridization and the changes to preliminary inquiries that are being proposed in the bill, by and large, don't affect us at all. We've been sort of left out.
That leaves us with the issue of the administration of justice offences, which perhaps hasn't been talked about quite as much, so I thought I would do so.
We were told that the AOJA offences are very numerous. I think the figure I heard was that 23% of all cases in the system are those kinds of offences. They're not actually federal offences. They're provincially prosecuted, although we do end up prosecuting many of them in what's known as “major-minor” agreements. Where there is a more serious charge on the cocaine trafficking file and that person has been released on bail but breaches that bail and there's a charge laid, that ends up tagging along in a major-minor agreement. The federal prosecutor will prosecute both of them. Thus, we do end up doing a fair bit.
That's important context to the statistics, because although they may be numerous and there may be a very valid debate as to whether there is overcharging and whether there are too many charges and we can do better in terms of having fewer of these charges, numerically, statistically, I don't think they're contributing in any meaningful way to the problem of delay. That's because they tend to tag along. The major charge gets prosecuted, and the breach follows along. When the major charge is resolved, however it's resolved, whether there's a conviction, a trial, a guilty plea, or an acquittal, the breach is then dealt with, usually in a summary fashion.
I've been a prosecutor for just over 20 years. I have worked in the GTA and in Ottawa, and I've also been fortunate enough to work in Canada's Far North. I've seen a couple of different systems. In a hamlet of 500 people in the north where there are two police officers, if you're put on bail and given bail conditions, you are extremely likely to get caught if you breach them, because that officer knows you and sees you every day. If you compare it with Toronto where, the moment you walk out of Old City Hall, you melt into anonymity, you find that there are many more administration of justice offences per capita in the north than in the major centres.
If they were contributing materially to delay, you would think the problem of delay would be much worse in the north than it is in Toronto, but it's actually the reverse. I have some ideas about why that is, but I'm not sure I have time to talk about them all.
Where I'm concerned is that the bill proposes to create yet another process. There's this new concept of a judicial referral hearing, a voluntary process that the Crown gets to engage, that doesn't really seem to add any new powers or new tools other than to add yet another layer. I'm not sure how the introduction of yet a new process in the very place that we are already congested is going to reduce delay.
We don't feel that there's really anything in the bill that's going to make the problem of delay better. We've come here today to humbly ask you for your help. There remains a really pressing need to tackle the problems of delay in the criminal justice system. It's not over. The work isn't done. In fact, it's barely even started. I would suggest that it should be done on a really urgent basis.
Thank you very much for listening.