The whole system is badly under resourced. Police struggle to keep up with the constant flood of stuff coming in; investigative resources are badly overburdened and are selectively committed. Quality investigations and follow up are difficult to commit time and bodies to because there is always more, more more.
Brown isn't any better. They have far too few counsel to work with, and compared to other legal jobs it doesn't pay particularly well- especially with student loans for law school in mind. They often barely look at a file before the first appearance date, and then they struggle to have time to do any deep dive to look for investigative weak spots that need to be shored up by police to keep the prosecution viable. In B.C. where crown get to approve or decline a charge, a great many viable prosecutions simply never move forward and a lot of criminals get away with a lot of crimes.
There are too few physical court rooms, and too few judges to preside over them.
Legal aid has significant limitations. You don't have to be making a ton of money to be ineligible. I've seen good lawyers working for legal aid, and I've had a few of my files torn apart by them. They care, but they are also overburdened. The nature of our court proceedings takes things very far away from the facts of a case; defences are often very abstract and technical, looking more for a 'gotcha' in the investigation than challenging the culpability of the accused on the actual facts of events. This pushes both defense and crown to spend a great deal more time and money, and drags proceedings out. Even a simple impaired driving charge may cost the accused $20k+.
The provincial jails that handle pre-trial detention are grossly overfull, and as a result a lot of people are not remanded in custody who ought to be. This leaves them on the streets causing more havoc, racking up more offences, putting more burden on police, paramedics, hospitals, and bail supervisors, and dragging more people into their criminal orbits.
The provincial courts are struggling to keep up with the requirements in R. v. Jordan to reach trial within now firm time frames. There have been charges literally for murder that have been stayed because things couldn't move fast enough. For the same reason police have to desperately rush disclosure, which leads to errors and oversights.
Once someone finally gets sentenced and goes to jail, they're either in the aforementioned overfull provincial system, or the also challenged federal one. Federal has the best rehabilitative programming, but sentencing guidelines mean that few offenders reach federal prison and access to those prisons, because they play catch and release through short provincial sentences for years first, getting caught more and more desperately in a revolving door. By the time they get a federal sentence, they are often far too set for programming to have much of a chance.
All of these challenges have our police, prosecutors, correctional officers, and lawyers burning out, and we're seeing it reflected in how many members are off long term sick.
It's a mess, and it comes down to resources and money.
