Canadian Judicial Council Annual Report

The Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) has just released its 2012-2013 Annual Report, aussi disponible en français, naturellement.

The Report noted the publication during the year of three informational documents related to the role of technology:

• Guidelines on Benchmarking of Costs
• Court Information Management Policy Framework to Accommodate the Digital Environment
• A Comparative Analysis of Key Characteristics of Court Administration Systems

Judicial conduct, one of the key concerns of the CJC, will be the subject of review:

In the coming months, Council will consider how best to engage stakeholders and other Canadians to explore all and any appropriate avenues of reform to the judicial conduct process.

In the 2012-2013 fiscal year, 138 new complaint files were opened and 131 were closed. Forty-four files remained under review at the end of the period. Nine complaints dealt with during the year were summarized in the report (with no indication of why these nine were chosen), of which seven were deemed inapt for the CJC and two were closed with judicial apologies. As well, the Report noted that there was a small increase in the number of files (34) deemed to be “an abuse of the complaints process or ‘clearly irrational.'”

As an aside, I was surprised to see that the very first sentence of the Report used the word “fulsome” — a word repeated later on. I know that it can have the meaning “plentiful” or “abundant,” but a brief look at the nearly ten other meanings afforded by the OED would suggest that this is not a word to be used in connection with the work of judges.