With regard to the OPP, the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario just made available its records to OPP officers. This is in regard to drivers' licence suspensions and whatnot, as a particularly useful tool.
But the problem is that the MTO has also now downloaded the inputting of certain types of offences onto the Ontario Provincial Police and municipal police forces for those particular types of records. One of the challenges that now poses is that courts still expect an agent of the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario to provide those records to the courts, usually with a certain type of sworn statement.
One of the challenges we have is indeed that the devil is in the details, with how we work out the user-pay system, and also with making sure that when we provide more digitization to our police forces, we don't then download, on top of that, ever greater tasks in terms of digitization.
As you well know, having served, one of the challenges these days is transcripts for videotaped statements and interviews, which the police have to essentially transcribe, even though it might be the crown that requests them. Why is it that we cannot have a stenographer or whoever transcribe it, for instance? Because there are no resources within the system.
One of the challenges is indeed that we can have a user-pay system, but we also need to make sure that as part of the user-pay system we don't then increase the burden on police officers to input, or to provide data and digitized data that previously they didn't have to provide. I think this is one of the challenges with being called out to certain types of calls. When you would have started your career, a domestic dispute would have been a 30-minute call. Now if there is a domestic dispute, this takes an officer out for the full eight hours or more of his shift, because of all the paperwork and documentation that is required.
I think there is an equilibrium needed here between what serves the taxpayer and the individual who is calling the police force, and the burden it imposes on the police force. This is especially true in times when, for instance, the particular force or that particular shift might already be stretched because an officer is off on court duty, for which he had just been scheduled but for which the police force doesn't have any overtime resources to schedule someone else on that shift, so that particular shift is now down an officer. Weighing these challenges, I think, is much more complex than it appears.
In that regard, I think one of the greatest challenges is the way our court system operates, and the way people systematically—particularly on the defence side—abuse our court system, to continually push out trials for completely dubious and spurious reasons, claiming there wasn't full disclosure, or claiming that somebody needs a translator, an interpreter, or whatnot. So we push out these trials for a couple of years and then eventually, as in Kingston—where a reasonably mid-sized human-smuggling case was recently dropped from the system because it was essentially overdue—they are turfed.
I think there could be a major efficiency here. If we want our police officers to be able to respond to the calls that you've just laid out for us, and if we want them to be there for the taxpayer when his or her car is stolen, we need to make sure they don't get tied up in call after call to the courts, for the same case, in order to then have to defend those who say they need this piece or they need that piece, and we continue to have trials pushed out.
I propose a system where a change in the way the law is written...that both sides have an opportunity to make a full submission to the court, and whatever is not requested in that submission.... It's like walking into the ER, where you need to have someone at the front and a sort of triage person who decides that, okay, everybody has made their full submission, you want an interpreter, or you think there hasn't been full disclosure, and they pass that on to the crown and make sure that the crown checks that they have rightful disclosure. But when you come in front of the judge, this is your one shot at actually coming in front of the judge, so there is no continuously pushing things out.