An Interview with the Attorney General of Ontario

David Milosevic:

Good afternoon, Mr. Attorney General. Thank you so much for joining the OBA.

Attorney General Downey:

I'm really glad to be here. It's great.

David Milosevic:

Well, we appreciate your time.

I was hoping you can give some of our readers a sense of how you approach the task of court modernization as Attorney General.

Attorney General Downey:

My approach is informed by my experience. And my experience before was a lawyer, as you would know if you saw that interview. I was a court clerk, so I was the person behind, on the other side of the counter, actually receiving documents for filing. I did that for two summers, in the Barrie Courthouse, doing family law, and did all the adoptions for a period of time in that courthouse.

Attorney General Downey:

I went and did a master's in judiciary administrations, like a master's of public admin, but focused on the courts. And Carl Baar, Dr. Baar, led the program. There were six of us in the program per year. It's a very specific focus on how systems should run. And when I finished that degree, I got a job as a court registrar, so the person sitting in front of the judge. My job was working with new judges to help them learn how the paperwork happened, and how the system happened, because they're new on that side of the bench.

Attorney General Downey:

So I did that for a year, and then I went to law school. And coming out of law school, then of course I articled, fell in love with law, the actual practice of law, and have my own experience from that.

Attorney General Downey:

By the time I got to the seat, this spot, as attorney general, I had these different perspectives on how the system worked and didn't work, and quite frankly, a file folder of things that I thought needed to be fixed. We've gone well beyond that. But no, I came at it with a real sense of purpose.

David Milosevic:

That's a real depth of experience that you bring to the task, Mr. Attorney General. How would you characterize the justice system before the pandemic and the greatest challenges facing it before the pandemic?

Attorney General Downey:

I would say it was broken, in the sense that some of the systems weren't functioning the way they were designed. And everything was designed with a good purpose, but it became like a Gordian knot, is what I used in an interview when I was talking about auto insurance, and it applies here.

Attorney General Downey:

It just, it got tangled up in itself, to the point where it wasn't necessarily serving its original purpose. And we've had an opportunity over this last year to come at things with fresh perspective, and not just try and untangle the knot a bit, change entirely how we do things. And that's leaving behind inefficient systems and putting new ones in place.

David Milosevic:

It's fair to say that the response required to the pandemic was a fairly urgent one.