Is Justice on Target a waste of time?
Given that it has shown some positive results provincially, the project that aims to decrease the number of court appearances and days to disposition by 30 per cent certainly has some value.
But as Law Times has shown on
page 1 this week, the project is definitely a case of setting expectations too high.
Former attorney general Chris Bentley heralded Justice on Target as an effort that would dramatically improve the justice system by speeding up court processes.
But as a review of the project has demonstrated, it has largely been off its mark at several Toronto courthouses.
A major issue has been a lack of resources to support the project. As the review noted, Crowns in particular have complained about the absence of resources to make the project happen.
Bentley, of course, was clear in his initial comments on Justice on Target that he wasn’t going to be spending new money on it. Instead, he said the project was about revamping the way things work in the justice system in order to do them better and more efficiently.
It appears he was mistaken in proclaiming he could achieve dramatic results on the cheap.
On the one hand, his arguments are laudable. So often, governments announce programs that achieve mediocre results at a high cost.
Through Justice on Target, Bentley aimed to do things better through the elusive process of finding efficiencies.
While it’s possible that court staff — who according to the report are obviously resentful at having to implement the project without new resources — are holding back on participating fully in it, it’s also true that few governments ever find promised efficiencies without causing negative effects on the services they provide.
Of course, rather than declaring that the government would implement the program with no new money, it perhaps would have been wiser to say it was willing to allocate resources to areas where they were necessary in order to achieve the project’s goals. One obvious area is technology.
As the report noted, part of the challenge in implementing Justice on Target was the justice system’s antiquated technological resources, an issue that anyone who works in or deals with the courts would be aware of.
If the government wants to do a better job of moving cases along more quickly, investing in better systems is an obvious solution.
Overall, then, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Justice on Target. Instead, it’s an example of the government setting its sights too high without carefully identifying what was necessary in order to achieve its goals.
— Glenn Kauth
