Hurry up and wait: The Ontario court's relentless commitment to inefficiency

Our criminal justice system has turned scheduling into a spectacle of wasted resources and hollow rituals

Hurry up and wait: The Ontario court's relentless commitment to inefficiency
Michael Spratt

Hurry up and wait. It’s not just the unofficial motto of the criminal defence bar – it’s the most essential skill in our professional toolkit. Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part. But in Ontario courts, the waiting game isn’t just a test of patience – it’s a case study in systemic dysfunction.

Because if you wait long enough, you start to see how much effort goes into accomplishing, well, not very much at all.

Take a recent morning in court. I watched nearly two hours get swallowed setting three trial dates and two plea dates. It was a complicated set of matters with multiple counsel, and herding lawyers is no easy task. Everyone involved in these cases – seven lawyers, two provincial Crowns, a federal Crown, a trial coordinator, two clerks, a court reporter, and a judge – was doing their best to move things forward. One of the lawyers was double-booked, leaving another courtroom (and its judge and Crown) sitting idle while waiting for the scheduling dance to end.

And what did all this bureaucratic choreography accomplish? A few dates on a calendar. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Every moment a lawyer spends in court for administrative appearances is time not spent advancing cases. Every moment a judge is personally refereeing scheduling disputes is a moment not spent hearing evidence. This isn’t efficiency – it’s a judicially sanctioned round of musical chairs.

But the cause of the chaos isn’t laziness or malice. Ironically, it’s an obsession with delay – or more accurately, an obsession with the appearance of preventing delay. And to be clear, this isn’t a criticism of any judge or courthouse. We’re all trying to bail out a sinking ship using the leakiest sieves.

But like Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin: the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems – er, court efficiency – slips through your fingers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of judge-led “Intensive Case Management Courts” (JICMICs), mandated by a province-wide directive that, in theory, is supposed to streamline complex cases and avoid Charter breaches due to trial delay. In practice, it’s often a bureaucratic black hole.

Yes, sometimes judicial nudging is needed. But mandatory transfers to JICMIC – even in cases where delay under R. v. Jordan is a non-issue – can create more problems than they solve. Mental health treatment, ongoing disclosure, or evolving plea negotiations don’t need judicial micromanagement. They need time and the appropriate use of our limited court resources.

When you tie up judges in case conferences over cases that will never see a contested 11(b) application, you’re robbing the system of its most limited and valuable resource: judicial time.

We’re using sledgehammers to swat flies, then wondering why everything’s covered in drywall dust.

This isn’t new. In 2023, I wrote about the Ontario Court of Justice’s baffling embrace of bureaucratic absurdity under the guise of modernization. At the time, a province-wide practice directive required judicial vetting of routine adjournments, introducing new hoops to jump through without making anything faster or fairer. As I pointed out then, anyone hoping for a smoother, more streamlined process was bound to be disappointed.

Spoiler: I was right.

The problem isn’t just the rules. It’s also that those rules are entirely different in every courthouse. In one courthouse, a remand appearance can be done administratively; in another, you’ll need a full judicial audience. You can set a trial date in one region with a quick call to trial coordination; in another, you’ll need to pass through a gauntlet of pre-trial hearings, case conferences, and magical forms.

A few years ago, I ran a serious sexual assault trial in Regina. When the Crown sent me indexed, organized, and immediately usable disclosure, I was shocked. When I asked to schedule a meeting to set up a meeting to eventually schedule another meeting to get approval to schedule the trial, the Crown was confused. “In Saskatchewan,” they said, “we just set the trial.”

It was the first and only time I have ever said this unironically: Ontario could learn something from Saskatchewan.

The same goes for circuit work up north. As I wrote last year, the fly-in courts in Nunavut and Northern regions may be logistically complex, but they often dispense justice more efficiently than their big-city counterparts. Fewer forms, less red tape, and more focus on the people in front of the court.

Modernization doesn’t mean more bureaucracy. It means using our resources where they’re needed. Want to stop wasting half a day setting trial dates? Hire more trial coordinators. Pay them well. Train them properly. Then get out of their way.

Your friend Beckie coordinated a bachelorette party for twelve bridesmaids flying in from different cities on different schedules, and you made it to Thunder From Under on time! Surely, three lawyers can set a trial date without judicial chaperoning.

To be clear, some justice reforms are hard. We rely on the criminal courts to solve problems like mental health, poverty, and addiction – things they were never designed to do. Our politicians pretend that being “tough on crime” comes without cost. We have a legal aid system collapsing under the weight of austerity. And we prosecute shoplifting the same way we prosecute homicide.

These problems are real, and they’re hard to fix.

But this? This isn’t hard.

The system we’ve built isn’t working. Not for defence lawyers drowning in administrative complexities, not for Crowns stuck filling out forms instead of prosecuting cases, not for victims waiting too long for their day in court, and not for the accused, whose right to a fair and timely trial is undermined by a bureaucracy that confuses motion with progress.

We may have to wait for real reform, but let’s stop pretending that more rules, paperwork, and judges micromanaging the margins will get us there faster.

It never has. And it never will.