Research must always go hand-in-hand with action and implementation. While the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice primarily focuses on access to justice research and advocacy, it also recognizes the importance of putting the recommendations and strategies that are developed by evidence-based research into action. Indeed, it can be said that research, while important, accomplishes little if it does not spur others to act.
While the CFCJ’s national “Cost of Justice” survey is currently in the stages of data collection, there is a wealth of other studies with sound recommendations ready to be put into practice. One of the most recent is the final report of the national Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, which has sparked discussions around the importance of moving from research and recommendations to action and implementation. The report, “A Roadmap for Change”, which came out last October, calls on governments, academics, the legal profession, and all other stakeholders to rise to the challenge of improving access to justice in Canada. It provides a nine-point access to justice “roadmap” that delineates concrete and innovative goals that we should be striving to meet. Some of these goals include increasing funding for legal aid, strengthening the “Early Resolution Services Sector”, making access to justice a central part of professionalism, and transforming courts into multi-service centres for public dispute resolution. Each one of these goals has a set year for completion; all that is left to do is to take action to implement these changes.
The newly launched Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, formed in honor of the former Chief Justice of Ontario, Warren K. Winkler, seeks to do just that. Located at Osgoode, the Winkler Institute has an action-oriented three-pillar mandate that focuses on teaching and learning, research and innovation, and practice and pilot projects. One of the many projects already underway involves advancing Osgoode’s mediation clinic and ADR programs. Part of the vision for the Winkler Institute is to act as a justice laboratory where researchers and students can examine different dispute resolution environments and evaluate the impacts of these to create new methods of dispute resolution that improve access to justice. This year, the Winkler Institute will waste no time in announcing more innovative new projects that respond to the Action Committee recommendations, as well as to the proposals contained in other recently released national reports on how to improve access to justice (i.e. the CBA’s “Reaching Equal Justice” report).
The Winkler Institute has realized what is becoming clear to so many across Canada – access to justice is a problem that cannot be ignored or subsumed by other issues any longer. Working together with the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the Winkler Institute will begin to turn “thinking” into “doing”.
The Action Committee Report is posted on the CFCJ website at www.cfcj-fcjc.org/collaborations.
To learn more about the innovative Winkler Institute, visit www.winklerinstitute.ca or talk to Nicole Aylwin at the Winkler Institute’s new office in 1015A, Osgoode Hall.