The courts in Saskatchewan are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with postponements coming to jury trials and child protection matters, while other proceedings are seeing considerable changes.
The changes impact Court of Appeal and Queen’s Bench matters. Here is an outline of what is affected.
Queen’s Bench:
Chief Justice M. D. Popescul has issued a directive that applies to all Court of Queen’s Bench judicial centres throughout the province. Highlights are as follows:
All jury trials scheduled to commence between March 16 and May 30 will be postponed. That would impact scheduled trials in Battleford including the murder trial of Joshua Tucker, scheduled for May 19 to 27 in connection to a murder in the Cochin area.
Anyone summoned to attend court for jury duty for a matter scheduled before May 30, 2020, are not to attend court. The adjournment of jury trials will be spoken to in court or by video or audio conference on the date the matter was originally set for trial. Courthouses remain open to the public and press and media may attend proceedings, but court visits by classes and other groups have been cancelled effective immediately. It is recommended only those persons who are necessary to the proceedings before the court attend.
Parties with scheduled matters including trials, pre-trial conferences and hearings are encouraged, where appropriate, to adjourn those matters to a future date.
For affected criminal cases, arrangements may be made for re-election by the accused to trial by judge alone, if the accused wishes to proceed and the trial will proceed during the scheduled time period (if there is no other bar to the matter so proceeding). If there is no re-election and the trial must therefore be adjourned until after May 31, the court will give the case priority for rescheduling once normal operations resume.
For civil and family chambers, parties are encouraged to delay bringing new applications to civil and family chambers (including matters involving maintenance enforcement and inter-jurisdictional support orders) and to adjourn those already scheduled to a future date so long as the provincial government’s restriction respecting public gatherings remain in place.
Effective immediately and until further notice, all participants in regularly scheduled civil and family chamber applications (other than child protection chambers) are required to attend by phone. Participants are expected to be available by phone at the commencement of chambers until they are called.
The local registrar will call them at the phone number set out in their address for service unless the participant makes arrangements with the local registrar to be contacted at another number.
Child protection chamber matters scheduled for the week of March 16 to 20, 2020 and will be rescheduled by the court to a future date.
All conferences, trials and other hearings that are currently scheduled will continue. A party wishing to seek an adjournment should contact the local registrar so that the question of whether a matter may be adjourned can be decided. Should the Court determine that a matter should be adjourned due to the implications of COVID-19, the local registrar will notify the parties to attend a teleconference to discuss alternate scheduling.
Also, in consultation with court services, the court is encouraging the use of video and audio appearances for individuals in custody.
With respect to the Court of Appeal, there are no plans to cancel or reschedule proceedings at this time. However, all lawyers and self-represented individuals slated to appear in matters before the court are being notified that they may make their submissions by way of telephone rather than in person. The court is in the process of putting in place a system that will allow all those involved in a matter to appear by way of audio-video link.
More information and further updates can be found at the Courts of Saskatchewan website.
