What is the Access to Justice Index for Administrative Bodies?

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada said that “Ensuring access to justice is the greatest challenge to the rule of law in Canada today”.Footnote 1 Unfortunately, this statement is still true today.

We define access to justice as:

Enabling Canadians to obtain the information and assistance they need to help prevent legal issues from arising and help them resolve such issues efficiently, affordably and fairly, either through informal resolution mechanisms, where possible, or the formal justice system, where necessary.Footnote 2

Administrative bodies play a crucial role in delivering access to justice. By “administrative bodies”, we mean tribunals, but also government departments that adjudicate statutory rights, as well as regulatory bodies that sometimes fulfil an adjudicative function. When legal problems are resolved – whether formally or informally – this is most often done by administrative bodies, as opposed to the courts.

The purpose of the Access to Justice Index for Administrative Bodies (the Index) is to provide you with a diagnostic tool that gives you insight into how your administrative body is managing the challenge of delivering access to justice. For almost all questions, a high score indicates that your administrative body is doing well. A low score on a question may indicate that there is room to improve, but in some cases, a low score may also indicate that the administrative body has no control over the subject matter of the question, or has the authority to make improvements but does not have the funds to do so.

Ultimately, no one knows your business better than you, so you are best placed to analyse the results and identify where you might act to improve access to justice. The Index is simply meant to get you thinking about these issues.

We assume that there is always room to improve. So ideally, you would use the Index more than once. You would complete it to get an initial diagnosis, identify areas of priority to work on, and then implement change. After enough time to let the changes take effect, you would take the Index challenge again to see where to focus on next.