Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.
“If you step forward inside that place, you’re flipping a coin — whether you’re going to get justice that day or not,” he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.
Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.
That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.
A lot of municipalities these days are also falling all over themselves to put up speeding and red light cameras everywhere, which increases the institutional delay in our court systems. The ugly truth is that you just need to demand a court date for any ticket and they’ll maybe get to you in four years. Putting together your own charter 11b challenge template, which is pretty damned easy in the Internet age, lets you pretty much ignore the cameras.
I don’t have to ignore the cameras because my municipality decided the best place for the camera was at surface level in front of a high school.
I see someone out there nearly every day replacing the lens cover due to vandalism. Why they arent mounted on a pole like every other municipality is a mystery to me.