Criminal court backlogs are falling across Canada, but not in Ontario.
Statistics Canada released data on Thursday that showed court delays have been getting shorter in most provinces since 2015, but Ontario has stayed the same from 2015 to 2018. Alberta along with Newfoundland and Labrador had the largest decreases.
In 2016, the Supreme Court set out new time limits for completing cases in criminal court after case completion rates began to fall in 2013, while court caseloads, case times, and court backlogs began to increase during the same year. Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an accused person charged with an offence has the right to be tried within a reasonable time or the charges are thrown out of court like they were in the Tilbury dogfighting ring case. Time limits for the completion of criminal cases are 18 months for cases tried in provincial court and 30 months for cases tried in the superior court or in provincial court following a preliminary inquiry.
Statistics Canada said following the 2016 decision, the caseload handled by Canadian courts fell by 6 per cent to 182,910 open cases in 2017/2018, case completion rates jumped and court backlogs dropped.
"The courts have been closing their open cases at a faster pace since the time limits decision," according to Statistics Canada.
The data showed on any given day in adult criminal courts in 2017/2018, 60 per cent of cases were less than six months old in every Canadian jurisdiction and cases over one-year-old, which are beginning to approach the court time limits, accounted for 16 per cent of cases.
The agency said the median time to close a case in adult criminal court continued to increase in 2017/2018, reaching 121 median days, a figure that increased slightly from the previous year.