The phrase "culture of complacency" entered Canadian legal vocabulary through the Supreme Court's majority reasons in *R v Jordan*.[1] Moldaver, Karakatsanis and Brown JJ used it to describe the Crown/defence/courts collective acceptance of systemic delay in the criminal courts. The phrase does work in that judgment. It also does work — arguably more — outside the frame the Court used it in.
In *Jordan*, the Court was confronting a constitutional violation: unreasonable delay under section 11(b) of the *Charter*. The majority's conclusion was that the Morin framework had, in practice, taught everyone in the system to tolerate delay to which no one had consented.[2] The remedy was a presumptive ceiling of 18 or 30 months, depending on court level, beyond which delay would be treated as presumptively unreasonable.[3] But the diagnostic language — "culture of complacency" — was broader than the remedy.[4] The Court was describing a state of mind: actors in the system had come to treat systemic dysfunction as the weather.
Transplanting the phrase into the civil and family context is fair game and a doctrinal truism. The same structural features that produced the criminal-delay problem — professional autonomy, inherited practices, the absence of incentives or authority for most to move the needle — are present in civil and family litigation in Canada. The Supreme Court's intervention in *Hryniak v Mauldin* in 2014 named the problem in the civil summary-judgment context in almost identical language, describing a "culture shift" required to produce "accessible, timely and affordable" civil justice.[5] *Hryniak* pre-dates *Jordan* by two years.
Why does the diagnosis matter to the *A2Jai* project? Because the manifesto's prescription is not more lawyers, or more legal aid funding, or more procedural reform within the existing paradigm. That's A2J 1.0. That's been sought or tried for many years, with access to justice only getting worse, never better. A2Jai, on the other hand, is productization — building legal help as software products that deliver something concrete for the unrepresented in our legal systems. That prescription makes no sense if the existing system's problem is exclusively operational, but it does make sense if new product disruptions are needed to improve system failures.
The Court named the habit but has little jurisdiction to break it. The remedial ceilings in *Jordan* are coercive but bounded — they apply only to the specific constitutional claim of unreasonable criminal delay. The A2Jai manifesto's bet is that where the court's reach falls short, the productization remedy may help.
Note that the *Jordan* majority were careful not to assign blame to any one actor — Crown, defence, judiciary, court administration. The phrase "culture of complacency" was chosen precisely because it implicates the system rather than its participants.[6] Any borrowing of the phrase for civil, family, or regulatory use should retain that discipline.
Besides, as someone once accountable the administration of justice in Canada's largest province, the meagre accountability for justice failures should be democratic, albeit no government fell or rose on its management of a legal system. Not yet, anyways.
Notes
**[1]** *R v Jordan*, 2016 SCC 27, [2016] 1 SCR 631 at paras 4, 29, 40–41 [*Jordan*].
**[2]** *Ibid* at paras 4, 32–40.
**[3]** *Ibid* at paras 46–49.
**[4]** *Ibid* at para 40 (the Morin framework "does not encourage participants in the criminal justice system to take a preventative approach to delay").
**[5]** *Hryniak v Mauldin*, 2014 SCC 7, [2014] 1 SCR 87 at paras 1–2, 23–33.
**[6]** *Jordan*, *supra* note 1 at paras 4, 29, 40.