Kelowna facing brunt of Crown prosecutor shortage, but it’s not alone

BC prosecutors have taken their grievances to the airwaves as an understaffed workforce is forced to focus most of their work on only the most serious of crimes.

For the past two weeks, a BC Crown Counsel Association ad playing on radio stations across the province takes its workload dilemma straight to the public in cities across the province, including Kelowna.

With a shortage of lawyers, only serious crimes are prosecuted, while “non-violent crimes go unpunished,” according to the ad.

“I get a call from Crown counsel almost every day of the week explaining that they have too much on their plate and they’re concerned about dropping the ball,” association director Andrew Duncan told iNFOnews.ca. “It’s things like that which have motivated us to push this issue to ensure management and government are taking it seriously.”

It’s a problem felt across the Interior and on Vancouver Island, but it’s most pronounced in Kelowna, where Duncan said there are nearly 300 files waiting for charge assessments. The oldest are around a year old.

The association, which represents more than 500 Crown prosecutors across BC, filed a grievance against the BC Prosecution Service in May. It came after “several years” of prosecutor shortages that has only become worse over time, according to a news release.

The association’s grievance called on the province to bolster its Crown workforce in the Southern Interior with 20 hires, which would be a 25 per cent increase.

Duncan, who represents the Southern Interior region, said it hasn’t gotten better, but Kelowna isn’t the only Interior city facing the shortage.

“Not only has nobody been hired, but we’ve lost people whose positions aren’t going to be filled,” he said. “For example, in Kamloops we lost a Crown prosecutor (to Vancouver). He didn’t want to leave Kamloops, but he was forced to because there’s no position for him here, and it’s not going to be backfilled.”

It means when police forward charge assessments to Crown, the most serious get priority. Some can sit on the to-do list for weeks or months before they’re completed.

In addition, courts have ruled Crown have to meet certain timelines when prosecuting cases, but assessments are taking longer to finish. Duncan pointed to the prosecution service’s slow, “buggy” technology, along with the rollout of body-worn cameras for police.

“A file that might have been half-an-hour or an hour to charge approval, now we have to sit down and look at hours of body-worn camera footage,” he said. “It could be something as simple as a theft from Save-on Foods, but if there’s two or three officers responding and they each record an hour of footage.”

They’re required to disclose anything relevant to the case, and that can include footage from the initial response to locking up a suspect.

“It ultimately hurts the public and hurts the public’s face in the criminal justice system,” Duncan said.

BC Prosecution Service spokesperson Damienne Darby did not answer when asked to comment on the vacancies and how they are impacting the workload for Crown lawyers.

When asked about the association’s grievance, she said the BC Prosecution Service would not comment on ongoing, active grievances.