Amy Hamm: Canada's sluggish criminal trials don't take fentanyl trafficking seriously

National Post

a day ago

U.S. President Donald Trump said fentanyl was his reason for slapping a 35 per cent tariff on our country, to take effect on Aug. 1. Whether that was a fair excuse or not, Canada is indeed doing an abysmal job of dealing with crime, including drug trafficking.
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In June, a judge on the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted a stay of proceedings in the case of Margaret Rose Conrad, who was tried for illegally possessing a conducted energy weapon (possibly a Taser), along with various controlled substances for the purpose of trafficking. She racked up eight charges in total.
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Conrad's trial — which never began — was scheduled to end in August 2025, 33 months after she had been charged. This would have violated her constitutional right to a trial within 30 months (for cases heard in superior courts), which was set by the 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling of R. v. Jordan.
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In staying Conrad's charges, Justice Douglas Thompson said that none of the delays that caused the presumptive timeline overrun could be properly blamed on the accused. One of these delays, he explained, was 'rooted in the ongoing failure to make proper and timely disclosure of important evidence. It is unnecessary to say more. The analysis does not require a fault-finding as between police and Crown.'
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The public, then, is left wondering what — or who — can be blamed for this mess. Police? Crown prosecutors? The judiciary or government? All of the above? And it is not an uncommon mess, either: across the country, our justice system is plagued by delays that have resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of dropped criminal cases. This includes cases of murder, rape, assault, drug trafficking and drunk driving.
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In November, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of a case called R. v. Jaques-Taylor, which may result in changes to how courts calculate trial delays (the Attorney General of Ontario will argue for an approach that would be more favourable to Crown prosecutors, according to a court filing).
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Ideally, our justice system would move quickly and effectively enough that courts wouldn't have to wrestle with questions about rights-violating delays. But Canada has had its elbows so far down that we must choose the ideal balance between violating the Charter rights of the accused and allowing likely (sometimes known) murderers, rapists and drug traffickers to get off, scot-free — all because our justice system moves at the pace of a sedated sloth.
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Rather than fixing the problem, we instead have to decide which harmful societal effects we can best tolerate — whether they involve the violation of individual rights, or the collective harm suffered by society when criminals aren't dealt justice. It's pathetic.