A B.C. brother and sister accused of operating a large marijuana grow-op will not have to stand trial after yet another example of lengthy court delays led to their charges being stayed.

Say Quai To and his sister Say Lin To were arrested when they were found inside a Kelowna home alongside 1,300 marijuana plants and 800 clones. Each of them faced a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges of possessing and producing drugs for the purpose of trafficking, as well as electricity theft.

The two siblings pleaded not guilty to the charges, but it took 33 months from that plea to get a definite trial date set, a delay that provincial court Judge Robin Smith ruled was unacceptable.

The Feb. 14 decision, posted online Monday, came just a week after the B.C. government announced that nine new judges had been appointed to the provincial court system. One of those judges will serve in the Okanagan, but Smith said that person will just replace others who have retired.

"This is a sad state of affairs for the judicial system and not one that will be fully resolved by the recent judicial appointment. There would need to be an increase in the number of judges in order for that to happen as opposed to simply a replacement of retiring judges," Smith wrote.

He said that a 2008 review showed that the Okanagan court district would need 13 full-time judges to make sure all cases are heard within a reasonable time. That number has never been reached.

"For some considerable time now, we have been well below that full complement of judges and, as a result, cases are backed up and not just in criminal, but in civil and family as well," Smith wrote.

The judge pointed out that the charges against the Tos are serious and officials have a "high public duty" to make sure cases like this are seen through to the end.

Nonetheless, he ruled that the siblings' Charter rights were violated by the lengthy wait to get to trial.

"I can understand the difficult situation the government is in with limited resources, but in hard economic times, court work does not become significantly reduced," Smith wrote.

"It just begs the questions of whether or not the courts are an essential service where the resources have to be put in place in spite of the fact that there are limited resources available."

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that for most cases, institutional delays lasting longer than eight-to-10 months can infringe on the rights of the accused.

In the Tos' case, the judge ruled that 10 months of the delay was caused by the sister, who switched lawyers just before a scheduled trial date, leading to an adjournment. A second date was scheduled for 13 months later, but that did not go ahead either because there simply wasn't enough court time available.

Similar court delays became a hot-button issue earlier this month, after NDP leader Adrian Dix pointed to the case of a man accused of luring a child over the internet whose charges were stayed because he waited too long to get to trial.

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.

Judges and lawyers across the province have blamed the systemic delays on chronic underfunding, but Premier Christy Clark has said she is reluctant to toss more money at the problem.

Earlier this month, she appointed lawyer Geoffrey Cowper to perform a review of the justice system in an attempt to address the court delays and find ways to streamline the process.