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Charged in Vaughan? Your case will not be heard in Vaughan. It is listed at the Ontario Court of Justice in Newmarket, 50 Eagle Street West, and prosecuted by the York Crown. This page is a map of that system. Who holds your file at each stage, where they physically sit, and what changed across Ontario on June 1, 2026 when the new bail Practice Direction came into force.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Updated September 2026.

What Vaughan actually is, once you are charged

Vaughan is one municipality. Woodbridge, Maple, Kleinburg, Concord and part of Thornhill are communities inside it, not separate towns with separate courts, and the criminal system treats the whole city as a single stream. Vaughan sits in York Region. York Region's Ontario Court of Justice location is the Newmarket Courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West, Newmarket, Ontario L3Y 6B1, reachable on 905-853-4811. That is where a Vaughan Criminal Code charge is listed. It is also where the York Crown Attorney's office sits, on 905-853-4800, and where Newmarket duty counsel works, on 905-836-8580.

So the first honest thing to say about a Vaughan charge is geographic. Almost nothing about the prosecution of your case happens in Vaughan. The arrest does. The search does. The interview probably does. After that, every institution with real authority over your file sits somewhere else, most of it at the north end of York Region.

That is not a grievance. It is a planning problem, and it is why this page is built the way it is: around who has power over your file and where that power physically sits, rather than around the order your court dates arrive. If you want the calendar view, we set it out separately on our Woodbridge criminal defence page, which walks through each type of Newmarket court date in the order it lands in a client's diary. This page does the other half of the job.

Your address inside Vaughan changes less than you think

Clients ask this constantly. Does it matter that I was arrested in Woodbridge rather than Maple? For the court, no. For everything before court, sometimes.

The court location is fixed. Every part of Vaughan feeds the same Ontario Court of Justice at Newmarket, the same Crown office and the same duty counsel office. There is no local court, no local Crown and no local bail court in any Vaughan community. What does move with your address is the police presence you deal with, which desk you or your family end up standing at, and which neighbouring courthouse you might confuse yours with.

Thornhill is the awkward one. Thornhill straddles the boundary between Vaughan and Markham along Yonge Street, so two people living a few hundred metres apart in the same neighbourhood can be in two different cities. Both are in York Region and both feed Newmarket for criminal matters, so in practice the outcome is the same. If your matter is a Markham file rather than a Vaughan one, our Markham criminal defence page and our Thornhill page cover that side. For the neighbouring York Region municipalities we also maintain a Richmond Hill page and a Newmarket page.

Community	Municipality	Criminal court	What changes locally
Woodbridge	City of Vaughan	Newmarket, 50 Eagle St W	York Regional Police community substation on Islington Avenue, weekdays only
Maple	City of Vaughan	Newmarket, 50 Eagle St W	Closest to the 24 hour district station on Rutherford Road
Kleinburg	City of Vaughan	Newmarket, 50 Eagle St W	Rural north end of the city, Highway 427 corridor nearby
Concord	City of Vaughan	Newmarket, 50 Eagle St W	Highway 400 and Highway 407 interchange area
Thornhill (west of Yonge)	City of Vaughan	Newmarket, 50 Eagle St W	Toronto boundary is immediately south at Steeles Avenue

The station that holds you, and the counters that cannot

York Regional Police polices Vaughan. Specifically, #4 District covers Vaughan and King Township, and its district station is at 2700 Rutherford Road, Vaughan, Ontario L4K 2N9. That building is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which matters because arrests do not respect business hours. The non-emergency line for the service is 1-866-876-5423, and York Regional Police headquarters is at 47 Don Hillock Drive in Aurora.

York Regional Police also list two community substations inside Vaughan. The Kleinburg Community Substation is addressed 10418 Islington Avenue, Woodbridge, Ontario L0J 1C0, open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Substation is at 100 New Park Place, Vaughan, Ontario L4K 0H9, open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Here is the part families get wrong at two in the morning. Those substations keep office hours. They are community counters, not holding facilities, and a weekend arrest does not go there. If someone in your family has been arrested overnight in Vaughan and you are trying to find them, the 24 hour station on Rutherford Road is the starting point, and the fastest useful thing you can do is call a lawyer before anyone starts giving a statement.

Who laid the charge decides who holds your disclosure

Three different police services can end up investigating something that happened inside Vaughan, and which one it is changes who you chase for disclosure, whose notes you are reading and whose video you are trying to preserve before it is overwritten.

York Regional Police handles the city streets. That covers the overwhelming majority of Vaughan files: assaults, domestic matters, thefts, frauds, weapons, drugs on city property. Disclosure on those comes through the service and the York Crown at Newmarket.

The Ontario Provincial Police handles the provincial highways. Highway 400, Highway 407 and Highway 427 all run through Vaughan, and provincial highways in Ontario are patrolled by the OPP rather than by the regional service. So a stop on the 400 between Highway 7 and Major Mackenzie is normally an OPP investigation even though you were inside Vaughan the entire time. Same city, different force, different disclosure pipeline, often a different in-car camera system. The charge is still an Ontario Court of Justice matter and still gets listed at Newmarket, but counsel has to know which door to knock on. That distinction matters most on dangerous driving and impaired driving files, where the roadside sequence is usually the whole case.

And then there is the federal layer. Drug prosecutions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are federal, not provincial, and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada runs them. In York Region that work is handled by a single standing agent retained by the federal service rather than by a government Crown office in the courthouse. We are not publishing that firm's name or contact details here, but it is worth knowing the arrangement exists, because a federal drug charge and a provincial assault charge arising out of the same arrest can be prosecuted by two different offices moving at two different speeds.

Steeles Avenue is a jurisdictional wall, not a street

Vaughan's southern boundary runs along Steeles Avenue. North of it you are in York Region. South of it you are in Toronto. People who live on that line cross it a dozen times a week without thinking about it, and then discover that it decides almost everything about how their case is run.

A charge laid on the Toronto side is a Toronto Police Service investigation, heard in the Toronto courts. Toronto adult bail, including weekend and statutory holiday matters, runs through the Toronto Regional Bail Centre at 2201 Finch Avenue West. York Region bail does not work that way at all. A Vaughan arrest is dealt with in the Ontario Court of Justice for York Region at Newmarket, where the York Crown and Newmarket duty counsel also sit.

Weekend and statutory holiday bail in York Region is heard in a WASH court sitting. We are not going to name a building for that, and you should be sceptical of any firm page that does. Ontario does not publish a consolidated list of which courthouse hosts weekend and holiday bail for each catchment, and the Court has confirmed those lists are not published online. Plenty of competitor pages assert a specific pairing anyway. We would rather tell you the truth: the sitting exists, it runs on weekends and holidays, and where it sits is something counsel confirms on the day rather than something you should read off a website.

The practical point for anyone near Steeles is simple. Where you were standing when the charge was laid matters more than where you live. If you were arrested at a plaza on the south side of Steeles while living in Thornhill, you may well have a Toronto file with a Toronto bail process, and the plan for your first 24 hours looks different.

Bail since June 1, 2026: the day both sides are ready

On June 1, 2026 the Ontario Court of Justice brought in a new province wide Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings, issued by the Chief Justice under Rule 5.1 of the Criminal Rules of the Ontario Court of Justice. It replaced the old bail protocol. If you are reading older pages about bail in York Region, a good deal of what they say is now out of date.

The rule that matters most to a Vaughan family is section 1.3. All reasonable steps should be taken to accommodate a bail hearing, whether it is consent or contested, on the same day the parties are ready. That applies to weekday bail courts and to weekend and statutory holiday sittings. Read it carefully, because the operative words are the same day the parties are ready, not the same day of arrest.

So readiness is the variable. And readiness, in practice, is mostly a paperwork problem. Whether you spend one night in custody or three usually turns on how quickly someone assembles a release plan, gets a surety declaration drafted and filed, and gets it in front of the Crown. That work does not happen by itself, and it does not happen faster because your family is anxious at the courthouse. It happens because counsel starts it immediately.

The Practice Direction also puts clocks on the hearing itself. A routine contested bail hearing is expected to take no longer than 30 minutes. A consent release is expected to take no longer than 15 minutes. Both are subject to the presiding judicial officer's discretion. All proposed consent releases put before the court are to be accommodated the same day. Where a matter has two or more complicating features, it can be flagged as a Complex Bail Matter and given additional court time, ordinarily not exceeding two hours, and complex matters are heard the same day they are identified as complex. Our Ontario bail hearing page goes through the release ladder in more detail.

What the Crown actually puts in front of the justice

A lot of the fear around a first bail hearing comes from not knowing what the other side is about to say. The Practice Direction narrowed that considerably.

In a contested hearing, the expectation is that the Crown will often file three things and no more: your criminal record if you have one, the synopsis or summary of the allegations, and copies of any existing release orders. That is it. Not a file of statements, not a curated highlight reel of the investigation. Three documents.

The Crown is also expected to provide defence counsel with a bail package in advance of the hearing. Not at the courtroom door. In advance. That single expectation changes what a competent defence looks like, because counsel who has the synopsis the night before can identify the weak points in the allegation, check whether the record actually says what the Crown says it says, and build a release plan that answers the specific concern rather than a generic one.

Then, at the start of every hearing, the parties now have to put their positions on the record: who bears the onus, the Crown position on detention, which of the grounds for detention are actually in issue and why, the Crown position on the form of release, the defence position, and the defence plan of release. That is a genuine discipline on vague opposition. A Crown who opposes release has to say which ground and explain it, which gives counsel something concrete to answer.

Sureties, and the question to ask before you phone anyone

The first instinct of most Vaughan families is to start calling relatives and asking who can be a surety. Sometimes that is exactly right. Often it is premature, and the Practice Direction says so.

Release with a surety is only required where the court is satisfied that a surety release is the least onerous form of release possible in the circumstances. That applies regardless of who bears the onus, and the parties are expected to consider and propose alternatives where alternatives are appropriate. So before anyone in your family agrees to pledge money and take on the responsibility of supervising an adult, the question worth asking out loud in the courtroom is whether a surety is actually necessary at all.

Where a surety genuinely is proposed, the mechanics have changed. Defence counsel should prepare the surety declaration, share it with the Crown, and file it before the hearing. Where that declaration has been filed, the expectation is that examination in chief and cross examination of the surety are not required. In plain terms, your aunt may not have to take the stand and be questioned about her income and her spare bedroom. She should still be available when the matter is called.

That is a real improvement for people who work shifts, do not speak English as a first language, or simply freeze in a witness box. But it only works if the declaration exists and has been filed. Nobody does that for you.

Check the address on your paper before you drive anywhere

York Region runs more than one kind of court, and they are not in the same building or even on the same street. This is where a surprising number of people lose a day, or worse, miss an appearance.

Criminal charges go to 50 Eagle Street West in Newmarket. Provincial offences, which is where a speeding ticket, a careless driving charge under the Highway Traffic Act, a municipal by-law matter or a Liquor Licence and Control Act charge ends up, are handled by York Region Court and Tribunal Services at 17150 Yonge Street in Newmarket, open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on 905-898-0425 or 1-877-331-3309. Two different streets in the same town. Two entirely different systems, with different rules, different consequences and different paperwork.

Where you are going	Address	What it deals with
Ontario Court of Justice, Newmarket	50 Eagle St W, Newmarket ON L3Y 6B1, 905-853-4811	Criminal Code charges from anywhere in Vaughan, including bail
York Region Court and Tribunal Services	17150 Yonge St, Newmarket ON L3Y 8V3, 905-898-0425	Provincial offences: traffic, by-law, liquor and similar
York Regional Police #4 District	2700 Rutherford Rd, Vaughan ON L4K 2N9, open 24 hours	The station covering Vaughan and King Township
Kleinburg Community Substation	10418 Islington Ave, Woodbridge ON L0J 1C0	Community counter, Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Substation	100 New Park Place, Vaughan ON L4K 0H9	Community counter, Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Toronto Regional Bail Centre	2201 Finch Ave W, Toronto	Adult bail for charges laid south of Steeles, not for Vaughan

Court schedules and service arrangements change. Everything above was checked against the Court's own published information, but if your date is weeks away it is worth confirming before you travel. The document you were served is still the authority. It names the building.

Appearing from Vaughan without driving north every time

Newmarket is at the top of York Region and Vaughan is at the bottom of it. Over the life of a file, that adds up to a lot of lost mornings, and one of the few genuinely good developments of the last few years is that you no longer have to absorb all of them.

Criminal case management court can generally be attended virtually or in person, by both the accused and counsel, unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. Some satellite courts do not have the technology and still require attendance in person. Guilty pleas are treated differently and are taken in person unless narrow consent conditions are met. On a contested bail hearing, the accused ordinarily appears by video unless the court directs otherwise.

There is a second, quieter advantage to having counsel on a York Region file. Where a court publishes a tiered list, represented matters are typically dealt with in the counsel call and unrepresented people wait for a later tier. That is not a comment on anyone's worth. It is a scheduling reality, and it means a self represented person can spend most of a working day at a courthouse to accomplish something that takes counsel a few minutes.

The honest caution is that none of this is automatic. Whether a particular appearance can be done remotely depends on the type of appearance and on what the presiding judicial officer directs. Do not assume you can dial in. Confirm it, every time, and never ignore a document that tells you to attend in person.

The court Vaughan cannot reach, and the principle that travels

Domestic charges are among the most common serious matters coming out of a city the size of Vaughan, and they are the ones where the criminal case and the family case collide hardest. Clients who have read about the Integrated Domestic Violence Court ask whether they can get into it.

The answer is no, and it is worth being clear about why. The Integrated Domestic Violence Court exists in one place in Canada: Toronto. Eligibility requires the family matter to be at 47 Sheppard Avenue East or 311 Jarvis Street and the criminal matter at 10 Armoury Street. A Vaughan domestic charge is heard at Newmarket, so it cannot qualify. Your criminal proceeding and any family proceeding will run as two separate files in front of two different judges, and somebody has to hold both of them in view at once. In practice that somebody is your counsel, because no court is doing it for you.

We also will not assert that Newmarket operates a Gladue court, a mental health court, a drug treatment court or a community support court. Those streams run at some Ontario Court of Justice locations and not at others, and we could not confirm any of them for Newmarket, so we are not going to imply otherwise. Where a community support court does operate, admission runs through an application to the local Crown Attorney, and court workers or duty counsel can help an unrepresented person apply.

One thing does travel with you into every courtroom in the province regardless of what specialized streams a building offers. If you are Indigenous, section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code and the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Gladue, [1999] 1 S.C.R. 688, require the court to consider your circumstances on sentence, and section 493.2(b) requires particular attention to the circumstances of Indigenous accused at the bail stage. That applies at Newmarket the same as anywhere else. It is not a specialized court; it is the law.

The charges that bring Vaughan clients to us

The charge categories that come out of Vaughan are not exotic. They are the ordinary run of Ontario criminal work, and the fact that they are ordinary is precisely why the details matter.

• Assault and domestic assault. Often a first contact with the criminal system, almost always accompanied by a no contact condition that separates someone from their home and their children before anything has been proven. See our Ontario assault offence page.
• Impaired and dangerous driving. Vaughan is threaded with provincial highways, which means an OPP file, a roadside sequence and a set of timing questions that decide most of these cases. See our dangerous driving defence page.
• Fraud and financial crime. Vaughan has a dense commercial and construction economy, and fraud allegations here often involve business records, invoices and a long investigative runway before anyone is charged. See our Ontario fraud defence page.
• Sexual offence allegations. Among the most serious things a person can be accused of, with consequences that begin the day the charge is laid. See our Ontario sexual offence page.
• Drug offences. Federally prosecuted, which in York Region means a standing agent rather than the provincial Crown office, and often a different pace.
• Weapons, theft, mischief and breach of conditions. Breaches deserve particular attention: an allegation that you broke a release condition can reopen your release entirely, and where there are two or more existing release orders in play the bail hearing can be designated complex.

We do not promise outcomes on any of them, and you should treat any firm that does with suspicion. What we do promise is that somebody reads the disclosure properly, tests the Crown's theory against it, and tells you honestly what your realistic options are before you make a decision you cannot unmake.

Why Kazandji Law for a Vaughan charge

Fadi Matthew Kazandji is the founding partner of Kazandji Law. The firm defends criminal matters across the Greater Toronto Area and York Region, and it runs family files too, which matters more than people expect when a domestic charge lands in the middle of a separation.

Our nearest office to Vaughan is in Thornhill, at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which is in York Region. Our head office is in Toronto at 180 John Street, Unit 320. We also have offices in North York and in Oakville. Clients meet us wherever is easiest, and in practice a great deal of a criminal file now runs by phone, email and video in any event.

What actually decides a Vaughan case is not where a law office sits. It is whether someone appears at 50 Eagle Street West when they are supposed to, deals with the York Crown properly, gets disclosure out of the right police service, and does the bail paperwork before the hearing rather than after it. That is the job.

• Toronto (head office): 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5
• Thornhill: 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, in York Region, our closest office to Vaughan
• North York: serving the Highway 401 and Yonge corridor
• Oakville: serving Halton clients

We give a free first consultation, we tell you what we think rather than what you want to hear, and we will say plainly when a case is difficult. Call 647-588-3234.

Vaughan criminal charges: the questions we actually get

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Vaughan and York Region. It is not legal advice and reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship. Court locations, schedules and practice directions change, so confirm anything time sensitive before you rely on it. If you have been charged, speak to a lawyer about your own circumstances.