Equality Under Canadian Law

Justice in Canada has grown a very long beard, has developed a noticeable limp, and is sclerotically errant in its need to address a completion of the loop between crime, arrest, charges and trial.

Where once trials took place in relatively short order after arrest and charges took place, that is no longer the case. And there have been shameful incidents where people clearly guilty of crimes against society have had the charges lodged against them dropped because of what judges recognize as an unconscionably long delay between charge and court date.

Leaving victims impacted and stunned by the reality of having been twice victimized; once by the perpetrator of an illegal and often violent act, and the second time by the inefficiency and justice-frigidity of the judicial system. And most justices and those in the law profession look for the source of the problem in one direction; the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Which, while protecting Canadians in ensuring their human rights are sacrosanct, also offers clever lawyers a manipulable tool for exoneration of charges.

Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on several fronts, throws its spanners into the revolving works and progress of justice. Lawyers can invoke portions of the Charter that they can claim have not been observed adequately or properly and thus their clients' rights have been infringed upon.

And if proceedings can be strung out long enough between charges and trial, that length of time too can be seen to contravene guarantees of speedy trial under the Charter.

In Burlington, outside of Toronto, Justice Stephen Brown claimed he had little choice but to stay an impaired driving charges in June 2011 when trial was set for October, 2012. "Because of the chronic, persistent and growing demands on the limited resources in Halton Region, we are slipping further into a crisis situation where the lack of allocation of government resources [have failed to] deal with the explosive growth in this region ... leading to a breaking point."

There are so many delays, so many delaying tactics, so many interruptions in proceedings, so many protests by lawyers leveraging the perceived entitlements of their clients under the Charter.  A lawyer well schooled in clever and disconcertingly deleterious delaying techniques on behalf of a client who can afford to pay the high costs of retaining skilled practitioners of the law, is able to delay, delay, delay.

A case in point is the trial of Pembroke dentist Christy Natsis, charged with impaired driving, driving with a blood-alcohol level over the legal limit, and dangerous driving, causing the death of another motorist, Bryan Casey in a head-on collision on Highway 17 on March 31, 2011. An OPP collision investigator's conclusion that the crash occurred in the lane of the dead man, meaning that an alcohol-impaired Ms. Natsis crossed into the opposite lane, causing the accident, has been challenged time and again by a high-priced legal team.

A team which has succeeded in throwing doubt over the accuracy of a tenacious, experienced OPP officer's testimony, and in the process argued that their client's rights under the Charter were abrogated when her lengthy conversation with a lawyer was finally closed down by the investigating officer. And when they succeeded in persuading the presiding justice to throw out blood-alcohol readings two and a half times in excess of the permissible legal limit.

And now, the trial that began in November, and which has undergone a number of 'pauses', is once again paused, set to resume again in November. A trial which should have taken at most three weeks to come to conclusion will have taken a full year. Delaying tactics and tactical questioning throwing doubt on the veracity of witnesses has availed this woman whose drinking-and-driving unconcern caused the death of another person, to avoid penalty.

Leaving the indelible impression that the law is not equally applied when those who can afford to pay out very high -- exorbitant -- professional legal fees have the upper hand in an imperfect system where justice is claimed to be without bias, and guaranteed equally, applied to all, under the laws of Canada.