Summary
“Canada’s criminal justice system is facing a litany of serious challenges, including significant underreporting of crime by victims, delays and inefficiencies, rising costs, and considerable overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prison. In 2016, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute issued its inaugural Report Card on the Criminal Justice System: Evaluating Canada’s Justice Deficit, which brought these issues to light using quantitative data and a systematic approach to measuring the strengths and shortcomings of the criminal justice system in each province and territory. It spurred public commitments by several provincial and territorial governments to improve their criminal justice systems. In this second report card, we use recently collected data to update the performance of the criminal justice system in each province and territory and in Canada as a whole. Using Statistics Canada data and quantitative statistical methods, we assess each province and territory’s criminal justice system based on five major objectives: public safety, support for victims, costs and resources, fairness and access to justice, and efficiency. Nationally, some trends stand out in the system’s performance over the last five years. There have been notable improvements in crime rates, which have dropped, there are now fewer police officers required per capita, and there have been increases in per crime legal aid expenditures on criminal matters, a measure of access to justice. On the other hand, the weighted non-violent crime clearance rate has declined, meaning proportionately fewer cases are being solved, the incidents of breach of probation per 1,000 crimes have risen, and the cost of corrections per capita has also gone up. Furthermore, Indigenous people are greatly overrepresented as a proportion of those in prison.There were some notable changes in the provinces and territories between the 2016 and 2017 report cards,including improvements in Ontario (which was the most improved) and Nunavut, and declines in Quebec and British Columbia. The overall grades for the 2017 criminal justice report card, in order of performance, for each province and territory, are shown in the table below, along with the 2016 ranking.”--Page 4.