 Hi, I'm Nancy Carter. I'm the Executive Director of Family Policy, Legislation and Transformation with the Ministry of Attorney General. This is a webinar to introduce you to the early resolution and case management model, which will be implemented in Surrey and Victoria, December 7th of 2020. The early resolution and case management model is part of the new provincial court family rules. That is a result of a joint project between the provincial court and the ministry. There was a consultation paper on these changes issued October to December of 2019. And a prototype has been operating in Victoria in the early resolution and case management model since May of 2019. The new rules were enacted May of 2020 and will come into force province wide May of 2021. What Surrey and Victoria need to know is that there will be early implementation of the early resolution and case management model in both those registries effective December 7th of 2020. The major objectives of the new family rules are to encourage early resolution where appropriate outside of the court process, make the court process and court forms more user friendly, make each court appearance meaningful and productive. And the focus of this presentation is primarily on how things will work in the two currently designated early resolution registries. To give some context in developing the new rules, there was consideration of a lot of the research in the area of family justice and the growing recognition that family law is different from other civil disputes. It is about structuring future relationships as much as it is about looking retrospectively at past obligations. It is also important to be positioning families to resolve not just their immediate issues, but issues that will arise in the future. So, enduring resolutions are important. We know in provincial court, there are high numbers of self represented litigants and while parents may be parties agreements and orders must be in the best interest of the child calling for interest based over adversarial position based approaches in many cases. A growing body of research around adverse childhood experiences recognizes that family divorce and separation is a factor that can contribute to adverse outcomes for children. So, how services programs and processes can be designed to help families mitigate those impacts on children is also something this approach embraces major drivers for the implementation of the resolution process is recognition that family law problems do not occur in isolation. Many people going through separation experience a cluster of legal and non legal problems because one problem frequently leads to another. For example, separation and divorce can cause mental strain and break down a family relationships, which can lead to depression, job loss, threatened repossession of the family home. Family justice is a social problem with a legal aspect and there are benefits to multi disciplinary approaches because of that. The people involved in family matters also tend to face greater barriers and complexity of issues than many other legal matters, poverty, mental health debt. So, resolution requires looking at underlying issues. So, the model in terms of what the early resolution process is has a couple of aspects to it. The rule will require that parties take the first step in the justice access center where services are provided to focus on early support, information and resolution. Assessment is the first step. A needs assessment is a one on one meeting with the needs assessor and each party. The needs assessor is a family justice counselor who is a neutral person trained to help people understand the court process and other ways that are available to resolve family matters and related issues. During the needs assessment, the family justice counselor will screen for a number of factors, including presence or risk of family violence. They will provide legal information, make referrals and identify next steps for the parties. Referrals will include referral to legal advice, referrals to community resources, for example, housing, counseling. Assessment will also determine if parties need to participate in a parenting after separation program for parties with children. They must complete a designated parenting education program. Assessment will also screen for whether a consensual dispute resolution session for CDR is appropriate. It may not be for a number of reasons, including power imbalances. If CDR is deemed suitable, the parties are required to participate in one CDR session. That can be mediation with a family justice counselor or a private mediator or participation in a collaborative family law process. While the requirement is one CDR session, additional CDR sessions are possible in the JAG if parties choose. Mediation may be in person by video conference or a shuttle process. If agreement is reached, a family justice counselor can formalize arrangements by preparing a written agreement or a consent order. Parties who cannot reach agreement still can receive assistance with their court process. So the JAG can help parties in clarifying and narrowing unresolved legal issues, understanding the court process and preparing for court, including assistance with forms. You'll see that under the court process box, there is an icon referring to a family management conference, and I'm going to come back to that and describe that in more detail in just a minute. One of the things to note is that there is provision under the rule for time sensitive matters such as applications about protection orders and priority parenting matters to proceed outside the regular flow of the early resolution requirements so that they can dealt. Be dealt with timely and in priority. You'll also note on this diagram that there are some numbers at the bottom of each of these stages and based on early indicators in Victoria, our own program experience and experience from other jurisdictions. Those are our projected resolve weeks for the various stages. So we are projecting that up to 40 to 50% of the cases. May resolve some or all of their issues prior to going to court by having these services available much earlier in the process. The early resolution requirements apply to court applications for family law matters, which is a defined term under the rules. These include parenting responsibilities and parenting time, child support, guardianship, contact with the child and spousal support. They do not apply to stand alone applications for protection orders, priority parenting matters, which are defined under the rules and which are time sensitive applications concerning matters regarding a child. Case management orders, consent orders, enforcement orders and orders to prohibit relocation of a child. These applications have their own process and forms and note of motion have been eliminated. These changes to the application process and forms will apply province wide in May of 2021. But what Victoria and Surrey users need to know is that these applications and forms will continue to apply in Victoria and will apply to Surrey effective December 7th. The approach to forms is a significant change. They will look and feel quite different. They have been designed for self represented litigants and we are actively working on a web based format that will allow users to interface with the forms in a first person conversational form. It's very similar to the divorce app that has been developed by court services branch. I mentioned earlier the family management conference. So family management conferences will replace first appearances in Victoria. These have been operating for a year and Surrey effective December 7th. There will be a different approach to first appearance. The operation of a family management conference is unique to each registry, depending on whether there are early resolution requirements operating in Victoria and Surrey. These FMC's will be scheduled in consultation with parties and council. This helps to avoid frequent adjournments, which is a feature of current first appearance court. The primary change is that there is more active case management to continue to encourage early resolution of issues. You can see that during a family management conference, there can be interim orders, case management orders, consent orders, conduct orders, and also direction to the parties about what their next steps are. There's more time generally provided for parties and to explain the orders that they are seeking. And because of the front end early resolution services, parties are more prepared. So the first court appearance is often more meaningful and productive. And Victoria is certainly seeing that these conferences are resulting in full or partial resolution and or parties are in a better state of readiness for further court proceedings. What we've been learning in Victoria is that by putting services in the path of parties earlier, parties are resolving or narrowing their issues. Less files are coming to court. Parties are recognizing the value of the process and they are coming to court more prepared. We are also seeing in Victoria a high level of support and community organizations who support assisting parties with some of those non legal issues. I talked about earlier, the early resolution requirements only apply to early resolution in case management registries. So, we've had a prototype that was launched in Victoria in May of 2019. That will continue. There will be some changes to the rules based on feedback that we've had while operating in Victoria. And those will come into force December 7th. Surrey will be the newest early resolution and case management registry and they will be applying this rule December 7th, 2020. More registries will be added as and when resources for services are allowed. I hope you found this overview helpful and please look for more detailed information on the website noted on this slide. We will be posting more detailed webinars on some of the subjects covered in this overview. So, stay tuned and keep looking back for updates at this particular site. Thank you very much. Good morning.