I don’t believe in silver bullets. This is something I say a lot here, but I repeat myself because it’s important. Easy answers to complex problems work for politicians trawling for votes or donations. They don’t normally work in the real world, where most problems have more complicated answers than “this person is bad” or “this thing is broken.”
But that’s a general policy. There are exceptions. And there seems to be growing evidence that a lot of the problems we have in this country would get better if we could just restore some efficiency to the administrative systems we rely on to get stuff done. Easier said than done, of course, but important to say all the same. We are drowning in process.
This all popped into my head after reading an article in the Toronto Star about controversial plans by the federal government to use federal prisons to hold immigration detainees. It’s a complicated policy file I’m not even going to attempt to summarize or analyze here, because this column isn’t about that issue. But what made it come to mind was the fact that, in many cases, Canada’s processes to review an application for refugee status — and then to proceed through appeals and reviews if rejected — can take literally years. The federal website’s wait-time estimate for a protected person claiming refugee or asylum status from inside Canada is 29 months. That’s for someone already here. And that’s just to get the first decision. An appeal can add months. And there are always more complicated cases that will fall outside these estimates.
As noted above, I’m not going to waste column inches today on whether we ought to use prisons or provincial jails in this area. But it struck me as worth noting that we’d be having a very different conversation if, for example, the period of detention were going to be weeks instead of potentially years. How I feel about someone being detained for a matter of weeks pending an appeal is a lot different from how I feel about a person being detained for months or longer. And the only real difference here is processing time.
I’ve used the immigration system as an example here, but the problem is much bigger and broader than that. I’ve written and spoken often in recent months about the delays in our court systems, which are increasingly causing cases, even those involving allegations of violent crimes, to be thrown out because the court system is simply incapable of handling the matter within the statutory time limit. For serious crimes, that’s 30 months. And the courts are no longer able to do that. Most cases are being processed in the required time. But, as backlogs grow, some — a growing number of them — aren’t.
And another example: though I haven’t ever had any direct experience with the system, I’ve been hearing from friends and frustrated readers about major problems in the province’s Landlord and Tenant Board. This isn’t an area where I have much expertise, but it took only a quick Google search to find a report from three months ago that says the case backlog at the board has surpassed 50,000. And that backlog has built up even as the number of cases brought before the board has plummeted and more staff have been put in place to process them. So that’s a problem.
The three examples above are all rather serious (and I didn’t even touch on the widespread dysfunction across the immigration system more broadly). But there are other, less urgent examples of this. In recent months, I’ve heard repeated horror stories about delays in accessing routine building permits for either residential or commercial properties. There isn’t a single stat I can provide that includes a useful average wait time, but suffice to say, whatever the nominal waiting period is on a government website, you’ll probably be waiting much longer for your permit. Also, recall not long ago how hard it was to get a passport.
The passport problem was fixed by an extraordinary infusion of extra staff and political attention. But I’ve been thinking about that since. Why does fairly ordinary government business — issuing passports being a great example — now seem to require extraordinary effort? How did we get to a place where a would-be refugee probably has to wait almost two and a half years to get a yes or no? Or consider the problem in the criminal courts. What’s the real warning indicator there — that the courts can’t reliably try major cases in 30 months or that we decided 30 months was acceptable in the first place? How did we get a tenant board with 50,000 cases that haven’t been reviewed?
All of these things, in combination, are signs of a system of governance that is breaking down. And political accountability is getting harder as it does. We elect politicians roughly every four years. When the processes that they’ll be overseeing are so dysfunctional that the average cycle-time to oversee a proposal from origin to execution exceeds that, the direct link between an elected official and their staff and the projects they are overseeing begins to vanish. Everything just becomes an exercise in report filing and task-force convening. And the courts get busier, and the building permits and passports don’t get issued.
We need to start asking ourselves how long all these processes should actually take. How long should it take to review and approve a building permit? Not how long we’ve decided it can take, but how long it should take? How quickly should a tenant complaint be heard? Why are the Americans able to convene and conclude criminal trials in months, while we take years?
We need to decide what reasonable goals are for all these things — and more — and then design, fund, and staff the systems accordingly. We need to stop accepting ever-longer delays for everything as inevitable and acceptable. We need to start fixing the things that are broken. And, yes, endless delays are a kind of failure.
Getting our administrative bodies back up to a reasonable level of speed won’t fix all our problems, but it’s a necessary step toward making it possible to fix the other ones. It’s the first step, really. Let’s go.
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