A former B.C. attorney general says that delays in the provincial court system aren't a new phenomenon, and it will take more than money to fix the problem.
Ujjal Dosanjh told CTV News that during his term with the last NDP government in the 1990s, court backlogs were leading to stayed proceedings against suspected criminals, just as they are today.
"These are difficulties that any government faces," Dosanjh said, adding that more funding isn't the solution.
The official opposition began hammering the Liberal government on the issue this week, after learning that a child luring charge had been stayed because of "intolerable" delays. In that decision, Judge Daniel Steinberg blamed government underfunding for the overloaded court system.
As it turns out, the same judge complained about the same issue in 1997.
According to a report in The Vancouver Sun, Steinberg stayed a charge of drug possession for the purpose of trafficking that summer after an approximately three-year delay.
"Society deserves far better than what they received in this case,'' he reportedly told the court.
In 1998, B.C. had 134 provincial court judges handling a load of 256,510 new cases. Today, 130 judges are tasked with 232,555 cases.
Leonard Krog, the NDP critic for the attorney general, was at the issue again during question period on Thursday, pointing to a Jan. 30 decision that saw impaired driving charges stayed against Wilfred Ronald Friesen in Chilliwack. Friesen was found guilty last year, but a provincial court judge ruled that the 33 months it took to secure that conviction were unacceptable.
Friesen's defence lawyer Philip Riddell says it's nothing he hasn't seen before.
"Unfortunately, it's not an unusual case because we're getting a lot more delay. A couple weeks ago I had the Crown stay a charge up in Kamloops because we were looking at 22 months on a simple one-day trial," Riddell said.
Provincial court judges tossed out 109 cases last year because the accused waited too long to get to trial, doubling the number of cases stayed in 2010. An estimated 2,500 cases are currently in danger of being tossed -- about 18 per cent of all cases in the system.
NDP leader Adrian Dix says the government deserves the bulk of the blame for the current situation.
"There are difficult choices all the time, but this one was largely created by a government that hasn't applied adequately resources and hasn't done reforms to match its decisions," he said.
The government appointed nine new judges to provincial courts earlier this month, and Premier Christy Clark has appointed lawyer Geoffrey Cowper to perform a review of the justice system.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Ed Watson
