What's Really Going On in Canada's Criminal Courts?

Last week’s post on the disturbing mismatch between Toronto Police Services arrest rates and provincial criminal court caseloads seems to have hit a nerve. Why devote so much funding and manpower to tracking and arresting criminal suspects when you know 95 percent of their cases will never reach trial?

Some subscribers wanted to know more about the process: where exactly were most of those cases dropping out of the system? I’m also curious. And I’d also like to look a bit more closely at the criminal justice system itself. Have their internal operational profiles been changing over the years?

Fortunately, there’s data that can help.

One thing that’s immediately obvious is that, despite Canada’s rapid population growth, Canadian courts are achieving far fewer decisions. In 2006, according to Statistics Canada, adult criminal courts reached decisions on 382,322 cases. By 2023, that had dropped to 215,038 - a 43.75 percent drop.

Now it’s true that through those years, the national incident-based crime rate per 100,000 dropped from 8,003 to 6,301, which was a decline of 21 percent. But given the growing population, declining crime rates don’t come close to explaining court productivity trends.

Toronto Police Services (TPS) arrest statistics provide some more useful context. You’d think court activity trends would have followed a parallel decline in police arrests. In fact, in 2014 (the earliest year for which data is available) TPS made a total of 31,876 arrests. By 2023, that number had dropped only six percent to 29,883.

There’s no doubt that our courts are getting a lot less done. And it’s not because there aren’t plenty of new cases lined up outside the door.

More interesting however, is seeing how conviction rates have been steadily dropping. Back in 2006, 65 percent of all criminal charges ended with convictions. That number was just 41 percent by 2023.

What changed? Well it wasn’t that courts were finding new ways to find defendants innocent. Acquittal rates remained steady between 3.1 and 3.8 percent of all cases until 2021, when they suddenly dropped to around one percent.

The data tells us that, for the most part, convictions and acquittals were replaced by decisions that were “stayed or withdrawn”. Here’s Statistics Canada’s definition:

“This category includes stays, withdrawals, dismissals and discharges at preliminary inquiry as well as court referrals to alternative or extrajudicial measures and restorative justice programs. These decisions all refer to the court stopping criminal proceedings against the accused.”

Exactly how far has the pendulum swung in that direction? Just 29.5 percent of all incidents were resolved through stays or withdrawals in 2006. By 2023, that number had climbed to 51.5 percent.

So the simplest answer to our original question “what happens to all those charged offenders who never see a courtroom?” is “they’re diverted.” And the dominance of those diversions is steadily growing.

The modern arbiter of justice isn’t a judge or even a jury. It’s a someone sitting in front of a computer in the Crown prosecutor’s office.