After almost nine months of court delays, case backlogs and potentially missed convictions, some much-needed relief is coming to the Sechelt provincial courthouse.
At long last, Attorney General Mike de Jong announced last Friday, as part of a province-wide appointment process, that lawyer Steven Merrick will become the new permanent sitting judge in Sechelt starting Oct. 12.
The appointment comes as a major relief to many in this community, but especially to the lawyers, court staff and Sunshine Coast RCMP who have all been directly affected - mostly negatively -by the lack of a sitting judge since the retirement of judge Ann Rounthwaite in January.
We can only imagine the frustration that Crown counsel Trevor Cockfield and other lawyers must have felt, when time after time he and his colleagues had to go into court and experience delayed trials because of a lack of a permanent judge.
Or how about the RCMP when they did everything right to complete their criminal investigations only to see some cases possibly fall apart because the accused was forced to wait too long for a trial? When that happens, the courts may consider throwing the case out on the grounds of an unreasonable delay. And while, to our knowledge, no cases were thrown out of Sechelt court because of these technicalities, cases were thrown out of other courtrooms in the province because they did not have a permanent sitting judge.
And while this fight was finally won, thanks to an impressive show of collective force by all our government leaders and other community justice groups who lobbied the AG's office and even went so far as to travel to Victoria in April to meet with de Jong, we have to ask the AG again why this took so long.
De Jong's office promised that an announcement would be made by the end of May, but here we are, nearly five months later, and we finally get our judge. It's quite sad and quite unreasonable for the AG's office to not come to this community's aid. And an answer as to why it took so long has been less than forthcoming. We've tried in vain for months to get answers. We've called, we've emailed - done everything we could to get some answers, but instead we've been met with one-line e-mailed responses from a ministry spokesperson, who, it appeared, couldn't be bothered with this community's plight or even to answer simple questions about process.
We can only surmise this is another instance where the Liberal government has failed miserably. We wish we had another answer for the situation, but it seems it's still stuck in cyberspace somewhere.
