New specialized teams will take charge of prosecuting cyber and cryptocurrency crimes as the province also moves to boost the number of judges to help clear a backlog of criminal cases, Attorney General Doug Downey announced Monday.
“We’re creating the first cryptocurrency and crime prosecution team in Canadian history, right here in Ontario,” Downey said. “We’re leading the charge across the nation, expanding the efforts and taking meaningful steps to protect Ontario.”
Cyber crime, he added, “has exploded in this province.”
The cyber teams will work with police and “be laser-focused on holding offenders accountable, while stronger and more efficient courts will support victims of crime and keep our communities safe,” Downey said.Â
The government plans to appoint 17 additional judges to the Ontario Court of Justice, and to streamline and expedite the process by establishing a pool of potential candidates.
“The Ontario government is proposing changes to improve public safety by getting tough on crime and putting violent, repeat offenders behind bars. The proposed changes, including new legislation to be introduced later this week, would strengthen the courts’ ability to deal with serious crimes by streamlining the judicial selection process,” the government said in a written statement.
It would also “require the Judicial Appointments Advisory Committee to consider criteria set out by the attorney general when reviewing and evaluating judicial candidates.”
For Boris Bytensky, president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, “the proposals seem to be better than the rhetoric, to be perfectly blunt about it.”
“I think that there is definitely some potential for positive outcomes based on these proposals, and there’s no doubt that having additional resources, such as more judges, put into our system is a good thing,” Bytensky said.
“If you have specialized units and prosecutors who are able to get to to prosecute those cases more effectively, more efficiently, that that’s good for the system.”
However, he added, the government needs to ensure judicial appointments are balanced, taking from the ranks of both Crown and defence lawyers.
Right now, there has “been an overwhelming shift in emphasis to appoint as many Crown prosecutors as possible, undoubtedly with a view of sending this message that we’re going to be appointing Crowns and we’re going to be tougher on crime,” he said, adding that can drain prosecution offices of experienced counsel and deter defence lawyers from staying in the system.
Bytensky also said the system could use additional funding in all areas, including for Legal Aid, “or you’re going to end up in the system that we have now, where you have a very large number of self-represented individuals that grind the system to a halt. If you only focus on funding part of the justice system, then the system won’t work anyway.”
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