Immigration and Criminal Defence Lawyer in Brampton

Because two different provisions turn on it and they are not phrased the same way. Section 36(1)(a) reaches a sentence of more than six months. Section 64(2), which governs whether there is any appeal at all, reaches a crime punished in Canada by a term of imprisonment of at least six months.

That makes the length of the sentence a decision with two consequences, one of which is invisible from inside a criminal courtroom. A sentence below six months can leave the Immigration Appeal Division open. A sentence at six months closes it under s. 64(1), and the family loses the forum where humanitarian factors, establishment in Canada and the best interests of a child are actually heard.

This is the argument for one lawyer across both. A plea resolved without reference to the immigration effect can be a good criminal outcome and an unrecoverable immigration one.

At the Brampton courthouses on Hurontario Street, 7755 and 7765, which is where Peel criminal matters are dealt with. Provincial offences are somewhere else entirely, at the Provincial Offences court on Ray Lawson Boulevard, and a ticket is not a criminal charge.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Speeding, careless driving and the other Highway Traffic Act charges are provincial offences and do not create criminal inadmissibility. Impaired driving and dangerous operation are Criminal Code offences and can.

Not by letter out of nowhere. Section 44(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act lets an officer who believes a permanent resident or foreign national is inadmissible prepare a report setting out the facts, which is sent to the Minister rather than acted on directly.

If the Minister considers that report well founded, section 44(2) allows it to be referred to the Immigration Division, a different division of the Immigration and Refugee Board from the Appeal Division, for an admissibility hearing. That hearing is where inadmissibility is actually found, and it is the point worth having representation at rather than after.

A conviction and a sentence of six months or more does not, on its own, close a file. It opens the section 44 process, and what happens at the admissibility hearing and afterward at the Immigration Appeal Division is still very much in play.

Often more than people expect, and citizenship is the one that catches people mid process. The Citizenship Act bars an application outright, not merely delays it, while someone is serving a sentence, on parole or on probation, or charged with an indictable offence or its equivalent, and the bar runs backwards from the application date.

So a charge that has not yet produced a conviction, and has not yet reached section 36, can still stop a citizenship application in progress. Where both are live, the two need to be read together rather than run as separate files.

Say at the first meeting that they are not a Canadian citizen. It sounds obvious and it is the fact most often left out, because a person who has lived in Canada for twenty years does not think of themselves as a foreign national or a permanent resident.

Bring the information or the charge sheet with the section numbers on it. The maximum term the offence carries is what decides whether s. 36(1) is engaged at all, and that is readable from the provision rather than from what happened.