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TORONTO — Shortly after Caroline Mulroney took the reins as Ontario’s attorney general, she spoke to a judge about the often stymied process of modernizing the court system.
“I said, ‘I heard you’re still working with fax machines,’ and the judge said, ‘Oh please don’t take away our fax machines, we worked really hard to get them,”‘ Mulroney said in a recent interview. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”
Mulroney calls it “essential” that the justice sector be modernized, saying it needs to be brought into the 21st century. But in a government that is trying to eliminate an $11.7-billion deficit, there is not a lot of extra money for new projects.
The Progressive Conservatives are continuing many modernization initiatives started under the previous Liberal government: almost all of Ontario’s courthouses now have wifi; remote access to defence lawyers and expanded remote video appearances are being tested at four detention centres; Crown attorneys are using electronic case management and scheduling in most criminal cases; some civil and divorce filings are done online; and there’s a plan to put elements of jury selection online.
But the government has so far not launched many new initiatives.
They did announce in their April budget that they intend to start forming jury pools using OHIP information instead of property records, in order to draw from a much broader section of society. The idea was recommended in an inquiry report by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci as a way to get more Indigenous people on juries.
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See Also:
(1) Under Premier Doug Ford, interest is growing in making Toronto more autonomous
