The Alberta Human Rights Commission (“AHRC”) has fought an uphill battle to resolve complaints in a timely fashion. There are a lot of complaints and there are finite judicial resources to process them.
This undesirable situation has led the AHRC to adopt case-reduction strategies to dismiss weaker complaints and to push the parties to resolve the rest prior to hearings where possible.
These strategies might be reducing the caseload, but I think they are tantamount to a forced – and I would argue sometimes unfair – resolution of complaints. In essence, I question whether the cure is worse than the disease.
AHRC’s Strategies To Reduce Caseload
The largest of the AHRC’s case-reduction strategies is surely their case screening function. With this tool, the Director can dismiss a complaint early on for having “no reasonable prospect of success” before the complaint is advanced along the complaint process to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal (the “Tribunal”). The screening function
