“I can feel very good about how I’m leaving the court and its positioning for the challenges that it’s going to face in the future,” Chief Justice Crampton told Law360 Canada. “I think our future leaders are in place.”
Those challenges include maintaining public confidence in the court, he suggested. “I would advise my successor to keep their eye on that ball, [which] has a whole bunch of different components. Obviously, continuing to attract good talent to the court and investing in our expertise is key,” he said. So is “continuing to pursue adequate funding so that we can modernize and so that we can manage our growing workload.”
Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton
During a recent wide-ranging exclusive interview to mark his retirement from the bench, the 67-year-old former Bay Street competition lawyer was asked whether the court can continue to do its job properly if the millions of dollars its registry needs for IT modernization, translation of its huge backlog of judgments, and adequate staffing fail to materialize in next week’s federal budget.
“We’ve managed to keep the trains running on time,” he answered. But there’s a growing backlog, and you can only do so much in a week, “and after that you need more resources.”
The chief justice retired Oct. 30, 2025, after 16 years with the Ottawa-based itinerant national trial court.
In the impending federal budget on Nov. 4, 2025, the court hopes to “to close, at least to some extent,” a $35-million “funding gap” from successive years of underfunding, he explained. The fallout from the cash crunch includes registry staff freezes, processing and judgment delays, burgeoning backlogs and reduced access to justice for the public, he said.
The court has also asked the Mark Carney government for two new associate judges, and seeks two additional puisne judges. “We’ve had a 500 per cent increase [this year in immigration judicial reviews/leave applications], relative to the … five-year average prior to COVID,” the chief justice noted. “It’s obvious that we need some more help in processing that workload,” he said. “We’re going to continue to have to fall behind if the workload continues at its current pace, and I don’t see any signs of it abating.”
(The court is on track for 32,000 new immigration cases filed this year, up from 24,000 last year.)
Additionally, “We’re quite busy with national security, class actions and other areas, so something has to give,” the chief justice remarked.
Meanwhile, the Federal Court has hustled to roll out measures aimed at increasing its speed and capacity to handle the fast-expanding workload, including last month reducing the hearing times and factum page counts for JRs of denials of temporary resident visas, study permits and work permits.
“We’re trying to be more efficient, but that’s not a complete answer,” Chief Justice Crampton said.
“We need more human resources and we need more financial resources to modernize, to in turn save money in the future,” the chief justice explained. “Because if we can do this digital shift, it will save money that’s currently associated with a lot of paper processing and duplication, because we have to manually take things from the [court’s] e-filing portal and put them into the system, for example.”
In addition to needing a modernized court records management system, the court’s registry also grapples with a large and burgeoning backlog of untranslated judgments, which was exacerbated last year by the court’s new statutory obligation to simultaneously release all precedential judgments in both English and French.
Yet last year, the Courts Administration Service received just a fraction of what the registry told the government was needed to meet the court’s translation demands.
“We need money for translation. We need money for modernization. We need money to keep up with the surging immigration workload,” Chief Justice Crampton answered when asked about the court’s hopes for a cash infusion from next week’s federal budget.
There has been some expansion of the court’s resources in recent years. Under the chief justice’s leadership since 2012, the government has boosted the court’s judicial complement by about a third and raised the number of associate judges from six to 10 (including one supernumerary associate judge).
Chief Justice Crampton also pushed to diversify what had been a predominantly white male bench, recruiting senior Indigenous and racialized jurists. In 2025, women make up more than half (22 of 41) full-time judges, including Associate Chief Justice Martine St-Louis.
“I’ve been fortunate,” Chief Justice Crampton said. “My father gave me good advice to surround myself with good people and let them do their job. Well, I’ve tried to do that. I’ve tried not to be a micromanager.”
The chief justice highlighted the expertise of the court’s judges and associate judges in such areas as immigration, class actions, competition, Aboriginal law, national security and maritime/admiralty. In IP, for example, “I would stack them up against anybody in the world.”
The chief justice also praised the work of the court’s active committees, and the leaders of various court initiatives, including Justices Alan Diner, Catherine Kane, Patrick Gleeson, Richard Mosley, Simon Noël and Associate Chief Justice St-Louis and her predecessor, Justice Jocelyne Gagné.
Measures were taken to increase the public’s access to justice, including an updated website, new online tools and resources for self-represented litigants, as well as the webcasting of proceedings of high public interest.
The court also reached out to the Indigenous bar and Indigenous community and created Aboriginal law litigation guidelines.
It strove as well to let more light into its caseload of “designated proceedings,” which are subject to confidentiality orders, and may take place in closed hearings due to the sensitive nature of the information involved, which may be classified or relate to national security concerns.
“We made a commitment to issuing more [public] decisions in that area, which I think we’ve done,” Chief Justice Crampton observed.
As well, the court’s creation of specialized “chambers” of judges in IP and competition law, maritime and admiralty, class proceedings and Aboriginal law “helps us to recruit” new members, he noted.
“It helps to give confidence to the bar that if they choose to come [to the Federal Court], … we’ve got expertise here [that] I think helps them feel comfortable about coming to us.”
Still, recruiting judges and associate judges from across Canada to the Ottawa-based itinerant court remains a challenge for several reasons, including the statutory requirement that Federal Court judges “shall reside” within 40 kilometres of the national capital region — a decades-old obligation that predates the availability of remote work.
Therefore, in order to incentivize more jurists from across the country to apply to the Federal Court’s bench, the Canadian Bar Association last year urged the government to abolish the residency requirement.
However, Chief Justice Crampton emphasized that the itinerant trial court’s judges must, of necessity, travel regularly. “It’s very, very important” to distinguish between a proposal to clarify or modify the residence requirement and any proposal to regionalize the national court by having judges reside in, and sit permanently in, the regional centres, he said.
Regionalizing the court would lead to different strains of case law in the Federal Court’s jurisprudence, he said. It’s therefore “very important” to keep moving judges around, he said. “That’s consistent with the initial rationale for the court in the first place, which was to eliminate those differences” in the interpretation of federal law nationally that had emerged in the appellate jurisprudence of each of the provinces.
However, achieving “greater regional balance” in the court’s composition continues to be a challenge.
“Personally, I think it has to do with us being an itinerant court more than the residency requirement,” remarked the chief justice, who has flexibly interpreted the court’s residency requirement to enable judges who live outside the national capital region to continue to reside at home during the writing weeks when they don’t travel.
“I think it’s important to have a physical presence in the regions,” the chief justice explained. “Because out of sight is out of mind, and part of the rationale for creating the court was to ensure an itinerant court, to ensure that we had … a good feel for local conditions [and] local issues of concern to local bars, and an appreciation of nuances in the region.”
If Parliament were to make clear that the residency requirement simply means that a judge must have a residence — as opposed to their principal residence — within 40 kilometres of the national capital region, it would not be a barrier to judicial recruitment, as much as just an additional expense for the non-Ottawa judges because they would have to incur the expense of having a second residence in the national capital area, the chief justice said.
Asked whether he has a new professional chapter in mind after what has been a very busy 40-year legal career, Chief Justice Crampton said he wants to take a breather for a bit.
“I really feel I want to just get some distance,” said the chief justice, who enjoys being active, whether it's hiking, golfing, cycling, swimming, skating, snowshoeing or cross-country skiing. “The only decision I’ve made for now is that I’m going to take six months before I make any other decisions,” he said. “I’m just going to relax and do a bunch of stuff that I haven’t been able to do … for a long time, like read and maybe travel more, visit the kids more, spend time with our new granddaughter.”
He said personal highlights for him as a judge included sitting on cases with “really fascinating issues” and national or constitutional implications. “I’ve pinched myself metaphorically sometimes just thinking how fortunate we are — and other judges say the same thing — to be able to sit on these cases.”
He recalled, for example, presiding at the Competition Tribunal over the Rogers/Shaw acquisition case in 2022. The tribunal issued its order and 88-page reasons on Dec. 31, just two weeks after the end of hearings.
“We showed the world that we could get a complex case like that in and out of the court in the time frame that met the party’s commercial needs — that was fantastic,” he said.
“But there have been … national security cases that I’ve sat on that were just fascinating cases. I actually started loving national security more than even competition law!”
The chief justice said that doing more work internationally could be a possibility in future. Before he joined the Federal Court in 2009, he was a competition and foreign investment lawyer and had also led outreach by the competition division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where he oversaw the OECD’s work in the competition field with developing and transitioning countries.
More recently, under the auspices of the international section of the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, the judge said he enjoyed working with jurists from Ukraine, South Africa and Moldova.
“I find it rewarding,” Chief Justice Crampton explained. “I hope, I think, it makes a difference. And that’s what … energizes me.”
Photo of Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton: Courtesy of the Federal Court
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