Scheduling snafu could cause Nunavut court case to be dismissed shortly after trial

Update: The Legal Services Board of Nunavut says that the charges against Ryan Inuksaq were stayed by the Crown this week. That means prosecutors don’t plan to pursue the case any longer, although they may still choose to do so later.

In an unusual case at the Nunavut Court of Justice, a Kugaaruk man will stand trial on three counts later this month—then, the court will hear arguments on whether those counts should be dismissed.

Ryan Inuksaq faces a trial in Kugaaruk on Dec. 13 on allegations of resisting arrest and assaulting two police officers in May 2018.

In April this year, prosecutors delayed Inuksaq’s trial because his “matter was dependent on the outcome of another, related case,” Inuksaq’s lawyer, Sally Paddock, said in documents filed with the courthouse in Iqaluit.

The court, which was scheduled to sit in Kugaaruk from Sept. 16 to 20, set Inuksaq’s trial for Sept. 18 at 9:30 a.m.

Inuksaq did not appear in court that morning because he was out of town accompanying his sister on a medical trip, Paddock said.

He did attend court after 4 p.m. on Sept. 18.

But the court said it could not start the trial then, or the next day, because there was no accommodation for the circuit court party in Kugaaruk, said Paddock.

“The court was aware that the next scheduled sitting in Kugaaruk was in April 2020.”

That date is long after the time limit in which such cases must be tried, Paddock added.

In a landmark decision in 2016, called the Jordan decision, the Supreme Court of Canada set time limits by when criminal matters must be resolved in order to ensure that the rights of an accused are respected. According to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “any person charged with an offence has the right to be tried within a reasonable time.”

The Supreme Court said that for less serious matters, like Inuksaq’s, the trial must be completed within 18 months. For more serious matters, trials must end no more than 30 months after the date police lay charges.

The court will convene a special sitting in Kugaaruk on Dec. 13 for Inuksaq’s trial.

But even that date is past the 18-month limit, Paddock said.

“The appropriate remedy is a stay of proceedings.”

The court scheduled a hearing for Nov. 22 for a judge to decide on this issue.

But for reasons not found in Inuksaq’s court file, that decision was never made.

Instead, the court scheduled Inuksaq’s trial for Dec. 13 and will set a date for the hearing on Jan. 6, 2020, according to court documents.

At least one Nunavut judge has come out strongly against the Supreme Court’s Jordan decision.

In a 2018 decision, Justice Paul Bychok wondered how the Nunavut Court of Justice can fit the “square Jordan peg into the round Nunavut hole while doing justice to Nunavummiut.”

Bychok cited regular challenges faced by circuit courts, such as transportation and infrastructure, and mentioned Kugaaruk in particular.

Kugaaruk currently has two scheduled circuit courts per year, and if one is cancelled due to the weather, that “has an impact out of all proportion to a similar cancellation in the South,” Bychok said.

Bychok, a career prosecutor with 15 years’ experience in Nunavut who became a judge in 2015, said the Jordan decision also does not take into consideration Inuit societal and justice values.

“I do not believe the [judges who decided] Jordan intended trial judges to re-assert past colonialist attitudes and practices which ran roughshod over the Inuit,” Bychok said in his 2018 decision.