by M Jerry McHale, QC, Chair

The report of the Family Justice Reform Working Group, A New Justice System for Families and Children, was released by the Justice Review Task Force (JRTF) in June 2005. The mandate of the Working Group was to build on previous reports in the course of exploring options for fundamental change to B.C.’s family justice system.

The underlying theme of the report’s 37 recommendations is the need for a justice system that is more accommodating to the needs of families, and a more fundamentally non-adversarial approach to the management of conflict arising on separation. As the report observes, research, studies and academic papers published in all common law jurisdictions over the past 30 years have repeatedly reminded us that the adversarial system was not designed for family cases, and recommended that family cases should be resolved outside the courtroom where possible. In B.C., the last 15 years has already seen much movement in this direction.

The following are the main recommendations in the report:

• enhance front-end information and services for families, mainly through the creation of “Family Justice Information Hubs”. These Hubs would serve as an accessible front door to the family justice system. They would provide information, orientation, assessment and referral for family members and would also serve to coordinate community services for separating families;
• require, for appropriate cases, mandatory participation in a consensual dispute resolution process like mediation or collaborative law before asking a court to resolve a family dispute;
• simplify forms, streamline procedures and make the family court hearing process more informal;
• ensure that family court judges are specialists with a special interest in and commitment to family law;
• implement a unified family court. The report explores three different unified jurisdiction models and recommends the superior court model – now implemented in seven other provinces – but only if B.C. could be certain that a single court would be adequately resourced and at least as accessible as the existing two-court system.

The implications of the recommendations are potentially far-reaching. For some it will take further research and consultation in order to fully understand how they would be implemented and what the consequences of implementation would be. The report has now been widely distributed and a number of consultation meetings – with Canadian Bar Association Family Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution sections for example – are planned to commence this fall. Comments can be sent by e-mail to the JRTF website: www.bcjusticereview.org

The ministry intends to develop a three year Family Law Plan in response to the report. With respect to budget, some recommendations have modest implementation costs; others have significant cost implications. Like all other public institutions, the justice system is operating within an environment of fiscal constraint and implementation will need to take that into account.

The report concludes by observing that fundamental change to the family justice system will involve more than changes to procedures, legislation and court structure; it also involves a continuing evolution of the roles and values of the professionals in the system and of the culture of family law generally.

This article was published in the October 2005 issue of BarTalk. © 2005 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.