Access to Justice

I do a great deal of work with Taxpayers Advocate Inc. to try and increase access to justice for taxpayers in a dispute with the Canada Revenue Agency. This weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Colin Lachance, the President of CanLII, at LawTechCamp in Toronto. He gave a fantastic presentation about the role of the internet in access to justice and it led me to wonder why we don’t have copies of entire Court files available online. We get access to the judgments through great sites like CanLII and the Courts themselves but still when someone who is unrepresented sits down to draft a Notice of Appeal or Application, wouldn’t it be great if they could go online and browse through copies filed by other people? The Rules of Procedure in most of the Courts give styles for major documents to be filed but these are nowhere near as useful as being able to see an actual Court File. You can go into a Court Registry Office and browse through the pleadings and documents in the file so it is recognized that these are publicly available, just not yet through the wonders of the internet. I’m adding this to the list of things that we should be pressuring those in high places to start making available and if anyone has any suggestions or comments, all will be welcomed!