SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
December 4, 2023 09:00AM

I’ll just go back to where the investments have been made. We’ve put a lot of resources into hiring full-time and full-time-equivalent individuals, making court clerks permanent and full-time employees, not just part-time, making sure that they have the tools that they need—about 340 full-time staff, whether it be crowns, reporters, clerks within the system. So we have made investments to scale up. We’ve reclassified staff so that they are in a better position and will stay in the job and keep the experience on the job, so we’ve made a lot of those investments.

But this bill, Madam Speaker, is really about fixing process, because things like vexatious litigants are eating up a lot of resources and we have to make sure that we’re making capacity in the system for those employees that we did hire to help bring those cases forward.

I’m happy to give more information. It’s really hard to give it in one minute, but I’ll give more information to you. We’re trying to get these people back on the job, quite frankly.

With something like human trafficking, if somebody has been human trafficked and the perpetrator is convicted criminally, I think everybody would agree that the victim shouldn’t have to go through the trauma of explaining the impact on themselves. It’s, quite frankly, patently obvious. That’s what the Victims’ Bill of Rights, as expanded under this bill, will allow us to do, is to not retraumatize those individual victims and allow them to get restitution.

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