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A multi-day power outage has thrown the Edmonton courthouse into chaos and is leading to renewed calls for a new building.
The south tower of the Edmonton Law Courts lost power Tuesday afternoon, prompting a fire alarm and temporary evacuation. The building was expected to remain closed through Monday, with crews still working to determine the cause of the outage and establish a timeline for repairs.
The outage forced the Court of King’s Bench, which occupies the building’s south tower, to relocate trials and jury selections to the adjacent provincial court tower, which did not lose power but is already struggling with space issues. Some Court of Appeal hearings were rescheduled entirely.
“It’s just chaos at the courthouse,” said Danielle Boisvert, president of the Edmonton Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association.
She said the outage shows the Alberta government needs to replace the aging building.
Edmonton’s current court building — a brutalist, six-storey concrete structure comprised of two towers east of city hall — was completed in 1972. It is the city’s second formal courthouse, replacing the Classic Revival-style courthouse built on the current site of City Centre Mall in 1912.
Calls for a new Edmonton courthouse go back to at least the early 2000s, when planning began for Calgary’s state-of-the-art court complex. The equivalent of a 32-storey skyscraper due to its high ceilings, the Calgary Courts Centre replaced five smaller court facilities spread around downtown Calgary and was one of the largest court complexes in North America when it was inaugurated by Premier Ed Stelmach in 2008.
Two years later, Associate Chief Justice John Rooke said Edmonton needs a similar upgrade. Speaking at a media event in 2010, Rooke told reporters that Edmonton’s courthouse is too small and that, given the land-hungry downtown arena project, the province should move quickly and begin the land assembly process.
When Rooke repeated those calls in 2013, the provincial court side of the building was reduced to using buckets to catch rain from its leaky glass roof. The problem wasn’t fixed until 2019, when the Alberta government built a new atrium connecting the two buildings.
The Alberta government has since committed $57.3 million for a revamped Court of Appeal building in Calgary. Edmonton, meanwhile, continues to hold some trials and jury selections at the Bonaventure Centre on St. Albert Trail, a holdover from the height of the COVID pandemic, when it was acquired for socially distanced court proceedings.
Boisvert said the effects of the power outage, however long it lasts, will ripple through the justice system. While some trials went ahead — including the high-profile sentencing of Anthony Bilodeau, which took place in a tiny provincial docket court where some attendees were forced to sit on the floor — others did not.
“It just creates another one of those little bottlenecks,” Boisvert said. “Similar to the COVID closures, you just end up with this situation where you have this chunk of matters — whether civil, family or criminal — that just don’t happen. All of a sudden you have to find space for them in an already really tight schedule.”
Alberta Infrastructure spokesperson Benji Smith said Friday the ministry considers the power outage “a high priority situation” and that electrical contractors were on site “concentrating on returning power to priority areas.”
“Once the cause is found Alberta Infrastructure can provide a timeline for the repair,” Smith said.
The Court of King’s Bench said Friday that court would remain closed Monday, with some cases transferred to the provincial court tower. Filing counters had moved across the street to the John E. Brownlee Building.
Source: EdmontonJournal
