BC's Attorney General is making a bold prediction that Court cases will begin to decline in the years ahead.
Shirley Bond says her Government is taking steps to take Court cases out of the system to ease the backlog.
"We have a number of Justice reform initiatives that will begin to take affect over the next year or two or three and the kinds of reform initiatives that we need to see to reduce that backlog I am hoping will make a difference so in fact while the number appears to be flatlined I am hoping to see it drop in the years ahead."
Bond says nine new Judges were recently appointed, "Very specifically, there will be an opportunity for those Judges to focus on reducing the backlog and we have to remember that for every Judge we appoint in British Columbia, if you add in all of the support staff and everything that's required, the cost of one Judge is well over one point four million dollars in our Province."
Bond says BC's tough new drinking-driving laws have also taken thousands of cases out of the Courts.
She says a new Civil Resolutions Tribunal will also remove some cases from the system.
"It is the first tribunal of its kind in Canada that will have British Columbians have the opportunity to use online tools to solve strata and small civil claims outside of the court."
The NDP Attorney-General critic says like the Premier's liquid natural gas promise, Shirley Bond's prediction of declining Court cases is a pipe dream.
Leonard Krog says Bond is focusing on overall case numbers while ignoring delays on a case by case basis.
Krog says immediate roadside prohibitions may have taken drunks off the road, but taking them out of Court is nothing to brag about, "What it has also done, in some respects, is essentially decriminalize drunk driving and turn it into an almost civil matter where the penalty is exacted from you with impoundment and things of that nature, as opposed to punishment in the criminal Court and the criminal record that flows from it and all of those things."
Krog says wih the BC Government less actually equals more as increasing delays in the system are ignored while the Attorney General focuses on an over all reduction of case numbers.
"Murder trials in this province 15 - 16 years ago lasted five days, that was not uncommon, start to finish. You are now looking at weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks into months to do a murder trial it means the system does not run along smoothly and quickly. I think Ms. Bond is being incredibly optimistic."
The BC Crown Counsel Association says the justice system is still plagued by a lack of funding and massive delays.
Spokesperson Samiran Lakshman says ten-percent of the prosecution team are tied up in mega criminal trials. As for Judges: "We are not providing enough Judges. We are still 12 Judges short of where we were in 2005 and we are cutting back on the prosecution service. We have cutbacks that have been meted out in the fall so we aren't able to efficiently deal with some of the justice reforms that we wanted to implement in making the system more efficient."
Lakshman says the recommendations of the Cowper Report also continue to be ignored.
"We didn't hear the government mention at all its plan to implement its Justice reform agenda that it wrote in the white paper that was supposed to be implemented by March 31st of this year."
Lakshman says 9 out of 10 cases in Family court have at lease one party without legal representation.
"So where you have an enormous amount of people who are unrepresented in family court it delays everyone on the family list waiting for it but also everyone on the criminal list and all the police officers waiting in the hall and all the victims waiting in the hall, waiting to testify. So what that does is it only postpones all those criminal cases already long in the tooth."
He says there are also over 2000 cases currently in the system that have taken 18 month or longer.
Lakshman warns any further delays could risk some of those cases to be thrown out due to unreasonable delays.