Action Committee Metrics Working Group

Collaborators:

CREATE Justice, Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, University of Victoria’s Access to Justice Centre of Excellence, and Accès au Droit et à la Justice

The Action Committee Metrics Working Group (the Working Group) was established in 2018 with a mandate to work toward inter-jurisdictional cooperation and coordination in the development of justice metrics. National coordination is in service of the common goal of making a larger amount of useful data more readily available to empirical researchers in order to enhance the capacity of justice systems to empirically measure program performance and evaluate user outcomes.

The purposes of national coordination included:

• to move toward enhanced data and performance measurement as efficiently and expeditiously as possible by pooling scarce resources and limiting duplication of work; and
• to harmonize data definitions, data points, software programs and so on, in order to,
  • maximize the ease and viability of conducting cross-jurisdictional research; and
  • better ensure that access research conducted in one jurisdiction will ultimately be useful and relevant in another.

This Working Group worked under the sponsorship of the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters in the context of the Roadmap for Change recommendations 8.1 and 8.2:

• 8.1 Promote a national access to justice research and innovation agenda that is both aspirational and practical.
• 8.2 Develop metrics of success and systems of evaluation reliable and meaningful metrics and benchmarks need to be established across all levels of the system in order to evaluate the effects of reform measures.

A key outcome of the Working Group has been collaboration among its members, the Federal Department of Justice, and Statistics Canada at the preliminary stages of development of the Canadian Legal Problems Survey, which has resulted in national user-focused data collection.

Experiences of serious problems or disputes in the Canadian provinces, 2021 (Statistics Canada Website, January 18, 2021)

Jerry McHale,QC, previous member, and Brea Lowenberger, part of panel on “The Quest to Measure Access to Justice – Linking the Global, National and Local”, National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters (Montreal, QC, April 11, 2019)