Criminal lawyer in Ontario

Disclosure is the Crown's file: the officer's notes, the statements, the video, the test results. You are entitled to it, and until it has been read nobody can tell you honestly what the case is worth.

Many charges are resolved on what the disclosure does not contain rather than on what it does. A missing continuity record, a stop with no articulable reason, a breath technician's certificate with the wrong times on it: these are not technicalities, they are elements the Crown has to prove.

Anyone who quotes you an outcome before reading the disclosure is guessing. We tell you what we think after we have read it, and not before.

It decides which court hears the matter, what the maximum sentence is, and whether you have a choice about the mode of trial. Summary conviction matters stay in the Ontario Court of Justice. Indictable matters can carry an election, and some carry a preliminary inquiry.

Many offences are hybrid, which means the Crown elects how to proceed after seeing the file. That election is sometimes worth submissions, because it changes the ceiling on the sentence and the record that follows it.

More than the fine. A record affects travel, employment that requires a check, professional licensing, insurance and immigration status. For anyone who is not yet a citizen, some findings carry consequences under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act heavier than the sentence itself.

A record suspension is possible later for most offences, but there is a waiting period after the sentence is complete and it is not automatic. The cheapest way to deal with a record is not to acquire one, which is what the work before trial is for.

This is the part of a criminal file that is usually handled worst, and it is the reason this firm runs the two together. Section 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act sets two different tests and they catch different people.

Section 36(1) is serious criminality and it applies to permanent residents as well as to foreign nationals. It is triggered by a conviction in Canada for an offence punishable by a maximum term of ten years or more, or by any offence where a term of more than six months was actually imposed. Note what that second limb means: the maximum does not matter if the sentence crosses six months.

Section 36(2) is criminality, it applies only to foreign nationals, and the threshold is far lower. A single indictable conviction does it, and so do two convictions under any Act of Parliament that did not arise from a single occurrence.

Section 64 of the Act then removes the appeal to the Immigration Appeal Division on a finding of serious criminality. So a sentence of six months and a day can end both the criminal matter and the right to argue about the immigration consequence of it, in one stroke. A plea that looks sensible on the criminal file alone can be the worst available outcome once status is in the picture, and sentencing submissions are where that is fixed.

Kapil Rathod carries the criminal matters. Where a charge sits alongside an immigration problem, which is common in this practice, the two are run together rather than by two firms who do not speak to each other.

You are told at the outset whether your matter is one we should take. Some charges are better served by duty counsel or by a legal aid certificate, and we say so.