VANCOUVER — B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver is one of the latest litigants to be affected by a judge shortage in the B.C. Supreme Court.
On Monday, Weaver showed up at the Vancouver Law Courts hoping that a defamation lawsuit he had filed in 2011 would get underway.
But along with five other court cases that were scheduled to begin, Weaver’s lawsuit got bumped because there is an ongoing shortage of the federally appointed judges in B.C.’s superior trial court.
B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen told Weaver and the other parties in court that there was an overbooking of cases and the court was not going to be able to accommodate them unless a judge became free later in the day.
“The reason is that we are still short six or seven judges. That has had an impact on our ability to provide the judges for the cases that have been set for trial,” said Cullen, who told the parties to attend the court registry to see if any judges become available.
Outside court, Weaver declined to comment, but his lawyer, Roger McConchie, said that all cases would be given “equal weight” and the fact that he represented someone with a high individual profile would never affect how the court decides to proceed.
He said the fact Weaver’s case was bumped was the result of the failure of the federal government to fill judicial vacancies in the B.C. Supreme Court.
“The provincial government over in Victoria has nothing to do with it,” he said. “This is not an unusual situation. I have another case in my office which was scheduled for trial last February, I believe, for a number of weeks and it got bounced the same way.”
The judge shortage has been plaguing the B.C. Supreme Court for some time as the federal Liberal government announced after the 2015 election that it would be changing the process for federal appointments of judges, looking to increase diversity on the bench.
Judicial advisory committees, which vetted candidates, were replaced with new committees and approved lists of candidates were re-drawn. The federal justice department could not be reached for comment on Monday.
Weaver, who was in 2013 elected as the first MLA for the B.C. Green Party in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head, filed a lawsuit against Timothy Ball, who retired in 1996 from a position as a professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg.
Weaver, who before he was elected served as the Canada Research Chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria, claimed that Ball libelled him in an article published on the website “Canada Free Press” in January 2011.
Among Weaver’s allegations are that the article conveyed a meaning that he was not competent or qualified to teach climate science to university students and that he cheated the Canadian taxpayer by accepting public funding for climate science research.
