A context of justice

This short paper has been written at the request of the Association of Justices of the Peace of Ontario (AJPO), in preparation for the work of the Sixth Remuneration Commission, and its purpose is to provide a context for that discussion.7 It begins by observing that to situate Ontario’s justices of the peace today, it is necessary to retrace the history from 1981 to the present. [...] More to the point, it is a reminder that justices of the peace should be integrated into the rest of the system, and not set apart because of the unique history and evolution of the office. [...] In the words of the LCO, “[r]egulatory law dominates many aspects of our daily living”, and the POA has a significant impact on the lives of Ontarians, “not merely because of the vast number of offences to which the POA applies or the number of proceedings commenced each year, but because of the nature of the regulatory offences governed by its process”.54 These laws are “necessary to regulate and [...] The first concerns the evolution of judicial independence and the recognition that justices of the peace are members of the judiciary, and included as such in the scope of the constitutional concept of judicial independence.88 If it seems obvious, any review of the Mewett report would show how pivotal a step it was to interpret the principle inclusively, thereby recognizing the 86 Supra note 52, a