Ottawa’s attempt at fixing the intake process for criminal cases misses the mark
Every criminal case in Canada begins in the same place: remand court.
Not the Supreme Court. Not a dramatic jury trial. Not some made-for-TV cross-examination where a lawyer uncovers the truth while the judge looks concerned and the witness sweats under fluorescent lights.
No. Criminal cases begin in the legal equivalent of an airport holding lounge. A bureaucratic purgatory where accused people, lawyers, prosecutors, and judges all wait for the justice system to slowly boot.
Remand court is where a case lives before a plea or trial date is set. It is the intake period of the criminal justice system. Disclosure gets provided. Crown and defence discuss possible resolutions. Judicial pre-trials are conducted. Trial dates are negotiated through a bureaucratic maze of forms and appearances that makes the old Consumers Distributing catalogue system look sleek and innovative.
And while all this happens, the accused (or their lawyer) keeps returning to remand court, over and over and over again, for updates about why nothing has happened yet.
Nobody wants to be there.
Accused people want their cases resolved. Victims want closure. Defence lawyers want to move files forward. As my articling principal used to say, “Defence lawyers don’t make money in remand court.” That remains one of the truest things ever spoken in a courthouse.
Remand courts are usually presided over by justices of the peace, and they are also the favourite playground of justice system reformers. Every few years, someone decides the answer to court delay is redesigning the administrative process around remand appearances. Different jurisdictions create different systems, rules, scheduling practices, forms, and little local rituals that everyone pretends make sense. It is a special kind of chaos for defence lawyers who practise in multiple courthouses and are expected to remember every local procedural quirk while simultaneously being in two places at once because legal aid cuts and underfunding have turned scheduling into a legal version of the three-body problem.
The latest reform effort comes from the Ottawa courthouse.
Under a new policy, criminal matters will receive a maximum of three remand adjournments or six months, whichever comes first. After that, the matter must either be set down for trial or plea. No more adjournments to “get dates.” No more lingering in remand court while the process unfolds.
The idea is simple enough – three meaningful appearances: disclosure, discussion, decision.
And to be clear, the goal here is a good one. Nobody seriously believes cases should drift endlessly through remand court without progress. The culture of delay is real. Some lawyers do treat remand court like a personal tickler system. Some cases stagnate because nobody takes ownership of moving them forward. Judges are right to push for meaningful progress and active case management.
But the problem with one-size-fits-all justice reforms is that the justice system stubbornly refuses to be one-size-fits-all.
Sometimes there are perfectly good reasons for additional remand appearances. A client may be completing counselling as part of a resolution. Disclosure may arrive late or incomplete. Legal aid funding may still be under review. A judicial pre-trial might not be available for weeks. A Crown may need a kick in the behind to review a file. Sometimes those repeated little check-ins are exactly how you catch problems before they turn into full-blown Jordan applications.
And remand appearances themselves are not exactly consuming enormous amounts of court time. Most last under a minute. We are not talking about multi-week constitutional hearings here. We are talking about administrative check-ins.
The bigger problem is that remand court delays are often symptoms, not causes.
In my practice, the largest sources of delay are not defence lawyers casually wandering through remand court for fun. They are delayed disclosure. Lack of pre-trial availability. Legal aid funding bottlenecks. Administrative hurdles. Understaffed courts. Not enough trial courts. And yes, Crown attorneys who sometimes treat replying to emails like the Ford government treats disclosing public records: technically possible, but only after months of delay and institutional resistance. I have a list of names.
The thing is, you cannot procedural-directive your way out of structural underfunding.
For decades, governments have dumped every social problem imaginable – addiction, homelessness, mental illness, poverty – into criminal court and then acted shocked when the justice machine grinds to a halt. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions are spent on policing expansions, enforcement initiatives, and tough-on-crime announcements that create more prosecutions for a court system already operating at capacity.
And that is what worries me most about Ottawa’s newest remand experiment.
The path of least resistance under this new system may be to set trial dates earlier and more often, even in cases that realistically would have resolved without one.
That may reduce remand appearances and create cleaner administrative statistics. But it risks depleting the justice system’s single scarcest resource: trial time.
Efficiency matters. Delay matters. Judges are right to demand accountability from everyone who works in the system. But meaningful reform requires more than adjusting timelines on a spreadsheet.
The real solution is not simply counting remand appearances. It is fixing the conditions that make multiple remand court appearances necessary in the first place: properly funding legal aid, ensuring timely disclosure, increasing judicial resources, simplifying scheduling, and giving courts the flexibility to manage cases based on their actual complexity and needs rather than arbitrary appearance caps.
Criminal courts are not assembly lines. You do not fix a traffic jam by moving the bottleneck one exit down the highway.
