Madam Speaker, with respect to the concept of the prodigal laws where cases and time expand dependent upon the amount of money available to serve the cases, that is clearly true. Litigation is a very expensive business. One has to have the money in order to fuel that fire. Depending upon the goodwill or indeed the lack of goodwill of some litigants, we can see time being eaten away by the courts.
In all fairness, many trial judges that I appeared in front of recognized the problem. They tried to do things about it. They did not like abuse of the court system. They did not like counsel wasting time. However, there was always a fear by the trial judges that, if they cut short frivolous arguments they would be overturned on appeal because they did not give the lawyer or individual a fair hearing.
I have found that judges have been more than tolerant of the comments, the length of comments and the time they take, not because they do not recognize the problem at the trial level but because of their fear of being overturned by a court of appeal which may not have that hands-on day to day experience and not see the problem creeping up. It is a serious problem.
When I was serving as a provincial justice minister, we tried to do a number of things to increase the efficiency and the use of the courts. It was extremely difficult to get the facts and the figures. The clerks who answered to a deputy minister and who answered to me kept all the records of the use of the courts but were prohibited by the judges from providing that information to me. Eventually after a long protracted battle I got some of it.
It essentially demonstrated that even in our provincial judges' courts, which are considered the workhorses of the court system, the day to day courts where 90% of the cases are heard, that three to three and a half hours a day was the average. That indicated to me that there was something wrong but I could not quite put my finger on it.
I have a tremendous concern that as we move toward the independence of the administrators of the court the very small ability that elected officials now have to demand some type of accountability will disappear completely. That is my concern.
I share some of his concerns but I would not necessarily fault trial court judges in that respect. Generally speaking they do a very good job of trying to move matters ahead.