Mr. Speaker, Bill C-31 is one paragraph long and simply increases the number of judges, from 30 to 50, at the superior court level across the country.
We need to put this in context in terms of the number of judges who sit at that level. The figure is somewhere in the range of about 750 to 800. Then there are a number of others who sit at the appeals level, plus the those who sit in the Federal Court. This section of the Judges Act was designed to allow for an increase in the number of judges appointed in this special category based on requests from the provinces and territories.
Other than appreciating that number, it is important to put in context the current situation and the length of time since there has been any increase in the absolute number of superior court justices across the country.
The simple fact is the increase in number does not even keep up with the overall growth of the population in Canada. Of the 20 judges to be added, 6 would be designated to go to the specific claims tribunal and would not be in our regular courts. Therefore, we would only get 14 additional trial judges at the superior court level across the country. The population increase far outstrips on a percentage basis, a per capita basis, those additional numbers of judges.
Across the country, bar associations, law societies and judicial councils have called on the federal government to increase the number of judges and hasten the number of appointments when vacancies are available. In my home province of Ontario, administrative senior judges have been unusually public in criticizing the government for the slow pace of appointments it has made.
We have heard from some of the other opposition parties the concern about the new appointment process introduced by the government. I do not think anybody who is objective about the process sees it as anything other than a very clear attempt on the part of the government, and in particular the Prime Minister, to ideologically shift the bench in the way appointments would be made.
It is not that the former Liberal administration was not guilty of similar misconduct in the way it made appointments, particularly of a partisanship nature, but this attempt to ideologically shape the bench is regrettable in a democratic society.
Again, I want to put in context the difficulties our judiciary has with the increased workload with which it is faced. Legislatures across the country continue to pass laws that, in effect, promote additional litigation. I do not want to overemphasize it, but this is true in the criminal law area. However, when the government introduced the appointment process change about a year and a half ago, what came out in the hearings of the justice committee was the small number of cases, percentage-wise, that were of a criminal nature at this level of the courts. The vast majority of criminal trials and proceedings in the criminal justice system are at the provincial court level, a different level than where these judges are.
What happens at this level and what increases the workload, not the sheer number of cases, although those are going up, is the number of super trials. These are trials that will go on for months and months and, in some cases, years. These are cases under the Criminal Code, under our anti-drug legislation, and they take up the entire year of a judge's workload at times. We are seeing more of those cases coming, not just in the drug area but in some security crimes that end up in front of the judges.
Therefore, the sheer number of cases is not going up. What is up going up is the length of the trials and the number of hours judges have to commit to those very lengthy trials.
That is true as well in civil litigation. I think of the amount of additional judicial time that was taken up across the country as the reforms went through in our auto insurance legislation. In Ontario, at one period of time, I was dealing with four separate pieces of legislation that affected automobile accidents depending on when they had occurred. This imposed significant additional burdens on our courts because they had to interpret those statutes as the law changed, which took up additional hours. That is repeated by any number of other examples across the country.
The number of hours spent on the criminal cases is going up. Similarly, the number of hours on civil litigation cases of a general nature is going up. Those trials are also becoming longer.
I can remember hearing some of our more senior judges describe what it was like to do a trial 20, or 30 or 40 years ago compared to the amount of additional work and hours that now went into these cases, with more expert witnesses and more witnesses generally called. A trial that might have taken 3 to 5 days is now taking 20 to 30 days in just the standard automobile accident trial where there is any kind of severe injury.
In addition to that, and perhaps where the greatest additional burden in absolute hours has come from, has been in the matrimonial law area. It is taking two forms. The sheer number of trials has increased dramatically. The interim motions and interim work that go on prior to trial and the time superior court justices are in court to hear the motions has quadrupled, and in some cases even more, their basic workload. That has gone up quite dramatically. It has been compounded by the number of files where one of the two parties, in some cases both of the parties, are self-represented. The reason for that is the costs in the vast majority of cases.
When I first started practising in the early seventies, a family law trial including a divorce, property settlement and the issue of support, whether spousal or child, would normally take two to three days. Those trials are now taking a minimum of 10 days and it is not unusual for them to go 20 or 30 days.
We are not talking millions of dollars. In most cases we are talking of the average family in Canada with assets of maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars and incomes in the mid-range. That is what trials cost at the present time. Therefore, many applicants and defendants before the courts cannot afford to be represented by legal counsel. This inevitably leads to much longer trials. From talking to judges, a great deal of frustration on their part is trying to ensure that the individual representing himself or herself gets a fair hearing and that the process is fair to both the represented party and the non-represented party.
The additional thing that happens, and it goes back to the shortage of judges, is this phenomenon in the matrimonial area in particular has resulted in additional costs. I think one of the Toronto papers through the holiday break did a lengthy article on the number of adjournments that had to be granted because there was not enough judges available in the province of Ontario. I know it is a problem in my hometown of Windsor and I understand it to be a problem across the province of Ontario. I also believe it is a problem right across the country.
When clients are represented by counsel, counsel goes to court with them on one of these interim motions, which usually takes an hour to two hours to argue. A lengthy list may have 10 or 20 files before the judge that day. If too many of them do not get resolved, that is if they are argued, obviously the judge runs out of time before the end of the day and the case gets adjourned.
However, the lawyer, who has prepared for the motion, sits all day in court waiting for it to be heard and, if it is adjourned, the lawyer charges the client for that time. The same thing happens again a week or a month later and it may be adjourned again. In Toronto, in particular, we are seeing repeated adjournments of that nature. This costs the clients more money and forces them, in a number of cases, after a period of time of being represented, to take on their own representation, which prolongs the amount of time that is being spent.
That is the context in which we are functioning. Again, the appointments of the additional 14 judges, while welcomed and needed, will not be adequate to deal with the problems.
I want to make a final point with regard to the criminal law cases. From a number of questions that I and other members of the justice committee have asked at the justice committee when legislation has come forward, I know the government has not been doing an analysis, as the amendments to the Criminal Code have come forward, on how much additional court time these cases would take.
I want to put this into context. When we increase penalties in particular or we create new crimes with severe penalties attached to them, we end up with fewer pleas of guilty, fewer negotiated plea bargains and many more trials. We have not seen that increase yet but that will be coming over the next while. Again, the sheer number of cases in front of our criminal courts is not likely to go up much but I believe the length of them will go up quite dramatically because most of these cases from where this new legislation is coming deal with more severe crimes. The government has not done an analysis of how much more judicial time will be needed to take care of that.
At the end of the day we are asking our judges to cope with a growing population and the number of cases that have been added to their trial lists as a result of that. In each one of the major areas that they must deal with, criminal law, matrimonial law and general civil litigation law, which includes commercial litigation, the amount of work they are doing per file is going up dramatically and, in some cases, the number of files is also going up.
The NDP members will be supporting the bill but we are urging the government today, and we will be doing the same at the justice committee when the bill gets there, to seriously consider augmenting this relatively modest number of additional judges and look at increasing the number more substantially in keeping with what we are hearing from the judicial councils, the bar associations and the law societies.