I am a subscriber to a national newspaper. We get the print edition of the newspaper to our personal injury law firm. You read that right. We still get a print edition of the newspaper in the digital age. Our subscription comes with access to the online newspaper, so that that there are paywalls behind their articles. Regardless, we still get the print copy for the office.
An insert in todays newspaper was a popular legal magazine. It’s read by many lawyers across Canada and Ontario. It’s geared to the white collar Bay Street crowd. Those who are focused on business law. It’s not really geared at Main Street lawyers, those who practice directly on behalf of everyday people, such as personal injury lawyers, criminal law lawyer, or family law lawyers.
The headline of the magazine was eye catching; just as a headline ought to be; so kudos to the editors. It was their “Litigation Special” edition of the magazine, and the headline of the publication read “Crisis in The Courts: How Backlogs are Harming the Canadian Economy“.
As a litigation lawyer, I don’t disagree with this statement. But it struck me that the victim of this statement was the Canadian Economy and not the people of Canada; like the Canadian Economy has emotional feelings or something. Now, the Canadian Economy can mean a lot of things. But, when you ask someone about the Canadian Economy, you tend to think about big ticket, macro economic items such as Banking, Interest Rates, Personal and Corporate Taxes, Housing prices, the Stock Market, Imports and Exports, Inflation, National Debt, National Deficit, the Consumer Price Index and large government subsidies for business or infrastructure projects.
The Canadian Economy is a very broad term, but rarely does one’s mind go to the smaller line items which Canadians see everyday. But these smaller items are what we see in the Courts every day; and more frequently than those bigger ticket items.