Fight that parking ticket online (finally)!

The Profession has recently been publically chided by both the Chief Justice of British Columbia AND the Chief Justice of Canada about how the exorbitant cost of legal services denies access to justice for most middle-class Canadians. All the while it has been a source of some frustration to me that the court system itself has made practically no effort to drag itself into the 21^st century and to streamline its processes to allow lawyers to navigate through the system more cost effectively.

For example, many, many routine court applications, requiring perhaps five minutes’ of time before a judge, turn into a day-long odyssey, including commuting for an hour or more from suburbia to the nearest Supreme Court registry, then cooling one's heels in court, behind a slow-moving line of foreclosure applications, all for some a little face time with the judge. The client, of course, is the one who has to pay for all this inefficient use of his or her lawyer’s time.

Accordingly I am gratified to see that the city of Vancouver is taking the bull by the horns and is introducing a new and modern system for the processing of parking ticket disputes. Under the previous system a parking ticket, like any other breach of the law, was processed through the provincial court with most of the quaint, old-fashioned procedures that attend a full trial. The result was that the 16,000 disputed tickets generated each year meandered through the system, tying up courtrooms, justices of the peace, police and bylaw enforcement officers, and court staff, sometimes for as long as two years.

Under the new system, a primary screening process will weed out those tickets which have been disputed because they are obviously flawed, leaving the rest to be heard by an independent adjudicator – either online or by telephone. This new approach is common-sensical and makes good use of existing technology.

A small step, to be sure, on the road to a more cost-effective and accessible justice system, but an encouraging one nonetheless, especially if it can demonstrate to the managers of our court system that technology can be their friend.