A disheveled young man stands in the pouring rain on the northbound side of Highway 99 in his stocking feet. His thumb is stuck out to alert passersby he needs a ride. He has no money, no cellphone and no way to get home.
He was arrested in Squamish and didn’t have anything on him at the time, so after being taken down to the North Vancouver courthouse for a bail hearing, he was released with only the clothes on his back.
This is a scenario local lawyer Greg Diamond said he has seen play out more than a few times since the Squamish courthouse closed in 2002.
Diamond has practised law in the Sea to Sky Corridor since 1997 and said addressing the issue of not having a courthouse is long overdue.
“Communities should have their own courts. The justice that is done should be done within the community. Shipping off your justice to be dispensed by another community just seems wrong,” said Diamond, a personal injury lawyer and former Squamish prosecutor.
The courthouse served Squamish and the corridor for 24 years before it was closed and the court service centralized in North Vancouver more than 12 years ago.
At the time, the province deemed the building not up to provincial standards. Renovations were said to cost upwards of $4 million, money the province said it didn’t have.
Not having the courthouse forces everyone involved in the provincial legal system to travel several hours and sometimes longer by bus, to and from North Vancouver’s courthouse. This distance is leading to serious consequences for the scales of justice in the corridor, according to Diamond.
“Sometimes witnesses are refusing to attend [court in North Vancouver], in spite of having a subpoena. From that end, if you are prosecuting, or a member of the public who wants to see somebody convicted of an offence, well, people are getting off because witnesses aren’t showing up,” he said.
And if witnesses endeavour to make the trip, it can be a risky proposition.
Diamond said a witness in one of his cases got into an accident on the way to court to testify. “They are forcing people to come 120 or 140 kilometres along a pretty notorious stretch of highway. If it is winter, there could be really treacherous conditions and then somebody gets hurt…. People shouldn’t have to be subjected to that kind of burden,” he said.
Without a courthouse in Squamish, the scales of justice also tend to tip in favour of the more advantaged. The provincial court deals with a lot of people of lower economic standing, Diamond said, and this can mean those without cars and cash face obstacles that wealthier people don’t.
“Not all of them have cars,” he said. “Imagine a single parent who is seeking support, trying to manage this when money is so tight.”
This imbalance is something Squamish RCMP media representative Sgt. Wayne Pride has also seen.
“We do have some people that we know don’t have the money, don’t have vehicles,” he said.
“Even if they are a criminal and we are dealing with them, they have the right to go down and address the charges and if they can’t make it, for legitimate reasons, then there may be a warrant put out for their arrest, if they don’t tell anybody.”
Pride said if a warrant is issued, police are required to track down suspects and arrest them. “And this has happened before, and we find them and arrest them and they say they can’t afford to go to court…. Well, we have to follow the procedure anyhow.”
Having to have officers go to North Vancouver to appear in court has an impact on the department in other ways too, according to Pride.
“I can’t say, I won’t say, it doesn’t affect us. We have officers in this community who, when there is court – and it is part of what we do – have to leave the jurisdiction to attend court. It is part of our job, we respect that; we work with it.”
“If we have a file where somebody broke into your house and we caught them, we owe it to you and the system to go to the very end to court. So, if a trial goes for ‘x’ number of weeks and I’m required to attend, I’ll be there, not in the community.”
Diamond recalls the days before the courthouse was closed as better not only for those within the legal system, but better for the community as a whole.
“When I was working for the Crown, our Squamish court was operating at over 100 per cent capacity.… You developed relationships with the police detachments, the health care providers, the youth workers and probation officers,” Diamond said. He said when Squamish had its own court, local issues were addressed with an understanding that is hard to replicate in a big city court.
“When I worked in Squamish years ago, crystal meth was a massive problem, but it wasn’t as big a problem percentage-wise in [Vancouver]. That was a really serious local problem. It was really hurting a lot of youth in Squamish and I don’t think that kind of a problem would have been seen in the same light or received as much attention in Vancouver,” Diamond said.
Mayor Patricia Heintzman said the courthouse has been on the radar of consecutive Squamish councils for years, and she has some possible solutions.
“Pretty much every council I have been on has brought the issue to the attorney general of the day to talk about scenarios upon which we could get a courthouse back, and essentially the general message has been you would have to provide the facility and we don’t currently have something that is suitable,” she said.
“But our municipal hall needs to be rebuilt in the next four or five years so… do we make it a multipurpose building where we might have a courthouse in that facility or at least build our chamber so we can dual purpose it so we can use it as a courthouse, for example?” Heintzman asked, adding there might be some partnership possibilities with Whistler.
She said for the province to get involved, the population of Squamish would have to grow to a tipping point where the courthouse made financial sense for the province.
The provincial government does not see the courthouse as a pressing need at this time.
“The Provincial Court of British Columbia has established standards for acceptable time to trial, which is six months. Cases within the District of Squamish meet those standards,” Attorney General and Minister of Justice Suzanne Anton told The Squamish Chief by email.
“Squamish cases have been heard in North Vancouver for over a decade and at this time the Province is not considering providing direct court services in Squamish.
Access to court services is also being supported through better use of technology and new processes, such as electronic filing of civil documents and use of videoconferencing and teleconferencing.”
Diamond said the online conferencing and video are useful in some situations, but far too simplistic to be a permanent overall solution.
“If you are having a trial, you cannot effectively cross-examine somebody on video. A judge cannot read someone’s body language when assessing credibility. It should very much be the exception to the rule.”
Pride said ideally there would be a courthouse again in Squamish, but, “we don’t take part in that decision. We just operate within the system.”
