So I got a jury summons last month. Fair enough. That’s a thing that happens. It said to respond within 5 days of receiving it and provided several methods of responding including an online form. In the response, I requested an exemption from service on one of the grounds listed and filed it immediately.
The documentation that came with the summons stated, and I quote, “If you are asking to be excused from jury service, we will respond to your Jury Summons”. Right, I thought. I should get a message back from them in a week or two indicating whether I actually need to turn up at the courthouse on the specified date. And then….crickets. Well, actually, crickets might have been more informative. Either way, nothing.
So on the assumption that they might have denied the exemption, I turned up at the courthouse. It turns out the exemption was approved but they couldn’t be bothered to inform me in any way even though their own documentation provided with the summons says they will. (Edit: they did send a response, see below, TLDR is that it’s still not good.) Their excuse? Due to the volume they can’t respond to everything. Not. My. Fucking. Problem. Well, actually it is because since they’re to lazy to come up with a notification system to tell potential jurors they’ve been excused, I had to waste several hours and the cost of travel to and from the courthouse to discover I didn’t need to be there. You’d think they would want to avoid that sort of thing for crowd control at the courthouse if nothing else.
Anyway, if anyone with any relation to the jury management group at the Court of King’s Bench in Calgary is reading this: Do better! This type of disregard for citizens’ time is exactly how you create animosity toward the system.
Edit 2024-12-24:
Now that Canada post is back to work and mail is flowing again, I finally received the response from Jury Management. In the mail. That would normally be fine except for a couple of details. The response letter is dated November 5, 2024. That is not, however, when it was mailed. The postage meter mark is dated November 14, 2024. That’s more than a full working week after the response was prepared (November 11 was a holiday). Even then, that wouldn’t have been a big problem since even if it actually got into the mail system on November 15, I would have received it in time. But Canada Post shut down on November 15 due to a postal worker strike which everyone knew was coming.
So my point still stands. Jury Management needs to do better. There are serious internal procedural problems if it takes 8 business days from when a letter is created to when it is mailed. That is straight up inexcusable.
But more damning is the fact that they sent responses by mail and then the post office shut down. That should have been a clue that they needed to actually try alternative notification methods or at least actually respond to inquiries about exemptions.
So still, to Jury Management in Calgary: do better!