Criminal Lawyers in Oakville, Ontario

Start with the paper in your hand, not the charge in your head

Kazandji Law has an office in Oakville, at 466 Speers Road. Oakville itself has no courthouse. Both of those sentences are true, and on the day you are charged the second one matters more. The Ontario Court of Justice location in Halton that carries criminal matters is listed by the Court as Milton (Halton), and it sits in the Milton Courthouse at 491 Steeles Avenue East. Nothing about your case is going to be decided on Speers Road.

This page is organised around documents. Not around stages, and not around buildings. Every real decision in an Oakville file is triggered by a piece of paper: a release document, an information, an offence notice, a disclosure package, a surety declaration, a family application. Each one carries a different address, a different office and a different clock. People get into trouble when they act on what they remember hearing at the roadside instead of what is printed on the page in front of them.

So read the paper first. It will tell you which Halton courthouse you are going to, whether the matter is criminal or provincial, what you have already agreed to, and how long you have before something happens without you. Our criminal defence practice and our family law practice both start the same way, by reading the document rather than the headline.

A word about the rest of this page. Everything below was checked against the Court's own location pages, the provincial court directory, Halton Regional Police and the Town of Oakville before it was published. Where no official source states something, this page says so rather than filling the gap with a guess. In Halton that restraint matters more than in most regions, for a reason that arrives in the third section.

One piece of geography before the documents. Halton Region is made up of the City of Burlington and the Towns of Halton Hills, Milton and Oakville. Four municipalities, one police service, one regional court structure, one regional council. When the word Halton appears on a document, it is describing that whole area rather than a town you can drive to.

One note about what a local office is for. It shortens the distance between you and your lawyer. It does not shorten the distance between Oakville and the courthouse. We come back to that at the end.

The first document: your release paper, and the address printed on it

If you were arrested and let go, you left with paper. It might be an undertaking, a release order, a summons or an appearance notice. The names differ and so do the consequences, but each of them does the same three jobs. It names a court date. It names a location. It sets conditions you are now legally bound by, whether or not anyone read them to you slowly at a counter at four in the morning.

Read the location line first. In an Oakville matter it will name a courthouse in another town, and that is normal rather than a mistake. Read the date line second, and put it somewhere you cannot lose it. Read the conditions third, and read them properly, because breaching a release condition is a separate criminal offence and it is the most common way a manageable file turns into a bad one.

A no-contact term does not soften because the other person called you first. A residence term does not pause because a friend offered a couch for a week. A no-alcohol term does not make an exception for a wedding. These are the small, human, entirely understandable decisions that produce a second charge, and a second charge changes the arithmetic of the whole file.

If a condition is genuinely unworkable, the answer is to apply to vary it, not to quietly ignore it. Conditions can be changed. The framework for release and for the terms attached to it sits in section 515 of the Criminal Code, which is built around the idea that release should be on the least onerous terms the circumstances allow. That is an argument, and arguments get made in a courtroom rather than in a group chat.

If you were held for a bail hearing instead, the first document that matters is not yours at all. It is the material the Crown puts before the court, and that has its own section below, along with the thirty minute expectation the Ontario Court of Justice now attaches to routine contested hearings. Either way, the paper is the anchor. Our explainer on bail and bail hearings in Canada covers the background if you want it before you call anyone.

Why nothing in an Oakville file is actually heard in Oakville

Here is the fact that shapes every Oakville case, and it takes about ninety seconds to check. The Ontario government publishes a directory of provincial court locations. On the day this page was written that directory carried 144 numbered court locations across the province. Not one of them is in Oakville.

The Halton entries in that directory are the Milton Courthouse at 491 Steeles Avenue East, Milton, and the Burlington Courthouse at 2021 Plains Road East, Burlington. Halton Regional Police puts the same point on its own public information page: there are three courthouses serving Halton region, and it lists Burlington, Milton, and the Halton Traffic Courthouse at 4085 Palladium Way in Burlington.

One point needs care. No official source publishes a municipality by municipality rule that sends Oakville criminal charges to Milton rather than Burlington, or the reverse. We checked again before publishing this. The provincial directory lists the locations. The Ontario Court of Justice names its Halton criminal location as Milton (Halton). Halton Regional Police describes both Burlington and Milton as handling criminal work. What none of them publish is a catchment map.

Your own document names your courthouse, so that is where we start. We would rather tell you exactly where to look.

Oakville does hold institutions, and heavy ones. Halton Regional Police Service has its Regional Headquarters in town, at 2485 North Service Road West, published as open 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Its 2 District Oakville station, also called 20 Division, is at 95 Oak Walk Drive. Check the hours on that one before you drive over, because the service publishes them as 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. rather than around the clock.

A town can hold the police service that charges you and hold none of the courts that hear you. That is the Oakville situation in one line, and almost every practical decision on this page follows from it.

If the paper is a ticket: one Burlington courtroom for the whole region

Turn the document over and look for the words Provincial Offences Act, or for an offence description rather than a Criminal Code section number. If it is a ticket, you are in a different system entirely, with different rules, a different prosecutor, a different building and a different set of consequences.

Halton has exactly one provincial offences court. The provincial listing records it as Halton Region, covering Burlington, Halton Hills, Milton and Oakville, under ICON code 1260, at 4085 Palladium Way in Burlington. There is no Oakville traffic court. There is no Milton traffic court. Every provincial offence charged anywhere in Halton, including everything the Town of Oakville prosecutes itself, is heard in that one building. Halton Regional Police publishes the court line as 905-637-1274 and the hours as Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

A provincial offence is not a criminal offence and a conviction does not produce a criminal record. That does not make it harmless. Demerit points, insurance consequences and licence suspensions all live on this side of the line, and some of them last years. People who would fight a criminal charge hard will pay a ticket to make it go away, then discover what it cost them at renewal.

The line between the two systems is also thinner than it looks. A driving allegation can be charged provincially or criminally depending on what the officer concluded, and the same evening can produce both. Where the allegation crosses into dangerous driving or impaired driving, you are back in the criminal stream, the building changes again, and everything in the sections below applies to you instead.

Do not let the ticket sit in a glovebox. The offence notice itself sets out your options and the window for choosing one, and choosing nothing is still a choice with a default outcome attached to it. Read the back of the notice on the day you get it. Details of every provincial offences court in Ontario, including the single Halton entry, are published in the provincial offences court locations directory.

One Oakville-specific piece of practical help is worth knowing about. Halton Regional Police publishes that the Oakville Public Library has space set up to assist people who have a virtual court appearance date but no reliable internet access, and points to a letter explaining how to book it. If your matter is being heard remotely and your connection at home is unreliable, arrange that in advance rather than on the morning of your appearance.

Two prosecutors, two disclosure addresses, one Oakville ticket

This is the sharpest piece of Oakville-specific detail on this page, and almost nobody writes it down. Your Oakville provincial offence is heard in Burlington. Who prosecutes it, and where you send your disclosure request, depends entirely on who charged you.

The Town of Oakville runs its own prosecutor's office. It prosecutes offences under the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, the Building Code Act, and various Town of Oakville by-laws enforced by Town staff. Disclosure requests for those matters go to the Town's Prosecutors' Office at 1225 Trafalgar Road in Oakville, or to the Town's published disclosure email address. The Town asks for requests six to eight weeks before the trial date.

Then comes the line that catches people out. The Town states on its own page that disclosure requests to its office are not for police-issued traffic tickets, and that if you received a traffic ticket from a police officer in Oakville, you submit your disclosure request to the City of Burlington Prosecutors' Office instead.

Read that twice, because the practical consequence is real. Two defendants can sit in the same Burlington courtroom on the same morning, both charged in Oakville, and be entitled to disclosure from two different municipal offices. A request sent to the wrong office does not start a clock. It sits. Then a trial date arrives with nothing in hand, and you are arguing from the worst possible position, which is ignorance of the case against you.

Disclosure matters more than most people assume. You cannot make full answer and defence to a case you have not seen, and the Town describes disclosure in exactly those terms: the process by which the prosecution provides the defence with all relevant information in its possession or control that may be used in the case, so the defendant can make full answer and defence. The same principle runs through the criminal stream, where the volume of material is far larger and the timelines are tighter.

The Town also limits what it will hand over to material that relates to the charge and is in that office's possession, and it will only provide disclosure to the person charged or to their authorised representative. If someone is helping you with a ticket, that authorisation needs to exist on paper before the request goes out, not afterwards.

If the paper is an information: what the Milton Courthouse holds

If the document names a Criminal Code section, you are in the criminal stream, and in Halton the fuller of the two criminal buildings is Milton.

The Milton Courthouse sits at 491 Steeles Avenue East, Milton, L9T 1Y7. The provincial listing for that building shows court offices open Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with counter service from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and again from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. The court types recorded there are civil, criminal, criminal youth, the Crown Attorney's Office, enforcement, family, the Victim and Witness Assistance Program, and small claims. That is a wide list, and it is the reason Milton absorbs so much of Halton's work.

Both levels of court run out of that one address. The Ontario Court of Justice names the location Milton (Halton) and publishes its criminal and family contacts for it. The Superior Court of Justice maintains its own Milton page with its own Halton criminal scheduling list, covering trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and reviews, 90-day detention review hearings, criminal applications and motions, and assignment court.

That matters when you elect. If your charge is indictable and you elect trial in the Superior Court, you do not change towns. You change courts inside the same building, with a different scheduling office, a different set of procedures and a different rhythm. People expect a move and are surprised when the address on the next document is identical.

The published contacts for Milton are worth copying down while you are calm. The duty counsel office, the provincial Crown and the court's own criminal and family addresses are all listed on the Court's location page. Federal prosecutions in Halton run through a standing agent rather than an in-house Public Prosecution Service of Canada office, which means the disclosure contact you are given for a federal charge is a private firm's address. That surprises people, and it is correct.

If you want to know what duty counsel can and cannot do before you arrive, Legal Aid Ontario explains the service and maintains a tool for locating the duty counsel office at or nearest your courthouse. Duty counsel is genuinely useful at an early appearance and genuinely limited afterwards, and knowing which is which saves you from relying on the wrong help at the wrong stage.

The Burlington Courthouse file, and what limited services really means

The second Halton criminal building is the Burlington Courthouse at 2021 Plains Road East. The province's own listing for it carries a warning that most court listings do not: it states that a limited number of services are available at this location, and it tells you to call before visiting to confirm the services offered and the hours of operation.

The court types listed for Burlington are criminal, criminal youth and small claims. Halton Regional Police describes the same building as handling criminal court services and small claims for the Region of Halton, with hours of Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Compare the two lists and the difference is obvious. Milton carries civil, family, enforcement, the Crown Attorney's Office and the Victim and Witness Assistance Program on top of its criminal work. Burlington does not. The word courthouse covers a much narrower operation at Plains Road than it does at Steeles Avenue, and if your matter needs a service the Burlington building does not offer, it goes where the service is.

Which is exactly why this page will not tell you where your bail hearing will be held. The honest answer is that your paperwork names the location and the court controls the list. We can tell you what each building is published as carrying. We will not invent a rule that no primary source states, because the cost of being wrong lands on you at seven in the morning in the wrong parking lot.

Halton does not stop at its own boundary for most people's lives. If you live, work or drive across the municipal lines, our Burlington, Milton and Mississauga pages cover those areas and the courts that serve them.

The bail package, and the thirty minute expectation now attached to it

If you were held rather than released, the next document that decides your week is not yours. It is the Crown's bail package, and what is allowed to go into it changed recently.

On 1 June 2026 a province-wide Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings came into effect in the Ontario Court of Justice, issued under Rule 5.1 by Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas. It is short, it is public, and it reshapes the hearing you are about to have. Anyone advising you on bail in Halton should have read it.

The core points, in the Court's own terms. All reasonable steps should be taken to accommodate bail hearings, whether or not on consent, on the same day the parties are ready to proceed, and that principle applies to weekday bail courts and to Weekend and Statutory Holiday bail courts. All proposed consent releases put before the court shall be accommodated the same day. The Court expects routine contested bail hearings to be completed in no longer than 30 minutes, and consent releases in no longer than 15 minutes, in each case subject to the discretion of the presiding judicial officer.

The direction also tells the Crown what a focused record looks like. The expectation is that in many cases the only materials filed will be the criminal record if there is one, the synopsis or summary of allegations, and copies of any prior release orders. Anything beyond that has to be summarised down to the portions actually being relied on, or put before the court as an oral summary. The Crown is still expected to provide the bail package to defence counsel in advance so that the hearing can be properly prepared.

At the start of the hearing both sides are expected to state the onus, the Crown position on detention, which grounds for detention are in issue and why, the Crown position on the appropriate form of release if detention is not sought, the defence position on form of release, and the defence plan. That is a structured opening, and a vague answer to any of those six points is visible immediately.

There is a release valve for genuinely heavy matters. Where a case has two or more of the listed features, such as two or more proposed sureties the Crown wants to cross-examine, a matter requiring an interpreter, or a section 524 application with two or more existing release orders, counsel may identify it to the presiding judicial officer as a Complex Bail Matter. Additional time will not ordinarily exceed two hours, and complex hearings are heard the same day they are identified as complex.

Thirty minutes sounds tight because it is. It rewards a plan that was built before anyone stood up, and it punishes improvisation. What we do with that constraint is set out in our Ontario bail material, and in more detail on our bail hearings page.

The surety declaration, and whether you need a surety at all

The surety declaration is the most underrated document in the whole system. It is also the one most likely to be filled in badly at eleven at night by somebody who has never set foot in a courthouse and is frightened of getting it wrong.

Start with the bigger point, because it changed. The practice direction states that 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, regardless of onus, and that all parties must consider and propose alternatives to a surety release where appropriate. The old reflex of producing a surety because that is simply what people do is no longer the starting position. It is one rung on a ladder, and the court is expected to look at the rungs below it first.

Where a surety is proposed, the declaration should be prepared by defence counsel, shared with the Crown, and filed with the court in advance of the hearing. The Court expects declarations to be completed, signed and sworn before filing. Where swearing it in advance has not been feasible, the surety may be asked to attend to confirm the accuracy of the contents on the record under oath, and where attendance is required, the surety may attend by audio-video conference unless the presiding judicial officer directs them to attend in person.

Two more practical rules sit in the same document and both work in your favour. Where a declaration has been filed, the expectation is that examination in chief and cross-examination of the surety are not required. And sureties should make themselves available at the time of the hearing, so that if release is ordered it can be entered into immediately rather than costing another night in custody over a signature.

There is also a fallback for the signature itself. Where it is not feasible for the surety to sign the release order in the presence of the court, the presiding judicial officer may dispense with a physical signature, provided the officer is satisfied the surety has committed to the obligations set out in the release, including the financial obligation, and understands they are bound by the terms whether or not they sign.

What all of that means for the person on the phone at eleven at night is simpler than it sounds. Your job is not to memorise answers. Your job is to be reachable, to be honest about what you can genuinely supervise, and to be available at the hearing time. A surety who overstates what they can do is a worse outcome than a surety who is straight about their limits, because conditions get built on what you said.

How Milton sorts its week, and where a Thursday file lands

Courthouses run on a calendar, and Milton publishes its.

The Ontario Court of Justice publishes the weekly pattern for courtroom 9 at Milton. Adult criminal case management runs all day Monday through Wednesday. Thursday in that courtroom is listed for domestic violence matters. Friday morning is listed for federal matters, and youth matters are listed for Friday at 11:00 a.m.

Inside a case management day the Court publishes its own tiers. Nine in the morning is adult case management for private counsel and Legal Aid duty counsel matters. Half past eleven is for people without a lawyer. Two in the afternoon is again for people without a lawyer. There is also a judge-led intensive case management stream for matters that need closer supervision. To keep counsel matters moving in order, the Criminal Lawyers Association and the Crown's office maintain a virtual counsel sign-up sheet for the Milton case management court.

Two useful things follow from that published pattern. First, whether or not you have a lawyer changes what time of day your matter is dealt with, which is not a small thing if you are trying to keep a job while a file is running. Second, a domestic file in Halton has a day of the week with its own name on it, which tells you something real about volume and about how those matters are managed as a group rather than one at a time.

Treat all of this as the Court's published pattern rather than a promise about your matter. Lists get changed, courtrooms get moved, and your own document governs. Check it the week before, then check it again the night before, and if the two disagree, believe the court.

The calendar also tells you something about preparation. A Thursday domestic list is a busy list. The matters that move on a busy list are the ones where counsel arrives with a position, a plan and, where relevant, a surety who is already prepared. The ones that get put over are the ones where somebody is still working out what they want.

The document that never gets written: youth pre-charge diversion in Halton

Sometimes the most valuable document in a file is the one that never exists. If the person involved is under eighteen, Halton publishes a route that can end a matter before a charge is laid at all.

Halton Regional Police runs a Youth Pre-Charge Diversion Program. The service describes pre-charge diversion as set specifically within the Youth Criminal Justice Act as an extrajudicial measure, and describes the programme as a community-based alternative for less serious incidents committed by young people between the ages of 12 and 17.

The offences the service lists as considered for diversion are shoplifting, vandalism, property damage, fraud, take motor vehicle without consent, assault, and possession of a controlled substance. The published criteria are that the young person is between 12 and 17, that there is sufficient evidence to proceed with a charge, and that the youth accepts responsibility and is willing to participate in the program.

What follows is a contract with behavioural conditions. The published examples include curfew, regular school attendance, alcohol or drug abstinence, abiding by parental rules and discipline, community service work, restitution, a written assignment, counselling, drug and alcohol education, and parental accompaniment to plazas and stores. Agreements are generally set for three months and can be extended based on individual needs. A designate from the youth office arranges a meeting to explain the program and confirm the criteria, and parents or guardians are encouraged to attend.

The consequence is stated plainly by the service and deserves reading twice. If the youth successfully completes the terms of the program, a charge is not laid. If the youth fails to abide by the terms, the agreement is terminated, the original charge will be laid, and the youth will proceed to Youth Court.

So this is not a free option, and it should not be treated as one. Accepting responsibility is a real step with real consequences if the agreement fails, and the underlying allegation still deserves to be examined first. Where the allegation is a theft, an assault or an alleged fraud, there may be problems in the evidence that make diversion the wrong call for that particular young person. Get advice before the meeting, not after it.

Family paperwork: two courts in one building, and the night both files describe

The address of this page says criminal defence and family lawyers, and that is not decoration. A large share of the files that come out of Oakville involve both at once, and the two sets of paperwork do not wait politely for each other.

Start with where family documents go. The Milton Courthouse carries family among its published court types, and the Ontario Court of Justice publishes a family contact for that building. The Superior Court of Justice publishes its own family scheduling for the same address. Two levels of court, one building, and the one your application belongs in depends on what you are actually asking for.

The dividing line is published by the Court itself. The Ontario Court of Justice hears many types of family case, including child protection, adoption, and cases about decision-making responsibility, parenting time, contact and support. It does not hear divorce or property cases. So if your application asks for a divorce, or for the division of family property, it belongs in the Superior Court. If it asks about parenting time or about support, it may well not. Filing in the wrong place costs weeks you do not have.

Now the harder overlap, and the reason this section exists. When a domestic allegation is laid, two files open and neither one pauses for the other. The criminal release order may contain a no-contact condition and a condition about attending a residence. The family file may be about who the children live with and when. Those two documents can pull in opposite directions, and the criminal condition wins every time, because breaching it is an offence and a family order is not a defence to it.

The practical work is to make the two files talk to each other. A release condition that makes a parenting arrangement impossible can often be varied, but it has to be asked for properly, on notice, with a plan. The family court needs to know what the criminal conditions actually say, word for word, not from memory. Handing a family lawyer a rough summary of your release terms is how contradictions get written into orders that then trap you.

Timing cuts both ways as well. Statements made in a family proceeding do not vanish because a criminal matter is running, and decisions made early in a criminal file can shape what is realistic on the family side for a year afterwards. That is an argument for handling both together rather than hiring two firms who never speak. Our family law and domestic violence pages set out the wider background. Where the allegation is a sexual offence or involves a weapon, the stakes on the family side rise with it, and so does the need to sequence the two files deliberately.

One thing this page will not do is claim a specialised court that Halton does not publish. Ontario operates an Integrated Domestic Violence Court that hears a family matter and a related criminal matter before a single judge, and the eligibility the Court publishes for it is tied to Toronto locations. No primary source names a Halton building as hosting it, so we are not going to imply one. Gladue principles are a different matter entirely: section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code binds sentencing judges across Canada, whether or not a dedicated Indigenous Peoples' Court sits in the building your matter is in.

Our Oakville office on Speers Road, and what it changes

Kazandji Law has a real office in Oakville, at 466 Speers Road, Oakville, Ontario L6K 3W9. The number for that office is 647-696-1468. It is different from the number our other offices use, so use the Oakville one if Oakville is where you are.

Here is what a local office actually changes. You can go through disclosure across a table instead of over a phone, which is the difference between hearing about a case and seeing it. You can sign documents without driving to Milton. A proposed surety can be met, briefed and prepared in person, which matters more than it used to now that the court expects a declaration to be completed, signed and sworn before it is filed. Instructions get taken face to face, and face to face produces better instructions.

Here is what it does not change, and we would rather say it than let anyone assume otherwise. It does not move your courthouse. It does not get your matter reached sooner. It does not affect which judge or justice of the peace hears you, which Crown has carriage of the file, or what the evidence shows. A local office makes meetings easier. It does not change the outcome of a case.

The firm also has offices in Toronto at 180 John Street, in Thornhill at 7191 Yonge Street, and in North York at 70 Forest Manor Road. Those three share a single number. Oakville does not. Addresses, numbers and directions for all four are on our contact page.

Whatever the charge, the first step is always the same. Bring the paper. Bring all of it, including the parts you think are irrelevant, the parts you have not read properly, and the parts you would rather not show anybody. The document set is where a defence starts. Reading it carefully on day one is worth more than any amount of reassurance on day thirty.

If you are still holding a release document and are not sure what it obliges you to do, that is the thing to ask about first. Conditions run from the moment they are imposed, not from the moment you understand them.

Thirteen questions Oakville clients ask us

What criminal charges do you handle in Oakville?

Assault and domestic assault, impaired driving and refusing a breath sample, bail hearings, theft, fraud, weapons, drug, sexual assault, harassment and youth charges. The case is heard in Milton or Burlington, and we meet clients at 466 Speers Road. Call 647-696-1468.

Is there a courthouse in Oakville?

No. The Ontario directory of provincial court locations listed 144 court locations across the province when this page was written, and none of them is in Oakville. The Halton entries are the Milton Courthouse at 491 Steeles Avenue East and the Burlington Courthouse at 2021 Plains Road East. Halton provincial offences are heard at 4085 Palladium Way in Burlington.

Will my Oakville charge be heard in Milton or in Burlington?

Read your own paperwork, because no official source publishes a municipality by municipality split between the two buildings. The Ontario Court of Justice names its Halton criminal location as Milton (Halton). The province describes the Burlington Courthouse as offering a limited number of services. Your document will say which one.

Does Kazandji Law have an office in Oakville?

Yes. The Oakville office is at 466 Speers Road, Oakville, Ontario L6K 3W9, and the number for it is 647-696-1468, which is different from the number used by the other Kazandji Law offices. It is useful for meetings, for going through disclosure and for signing documents. It does not change which courthouse hears your case.

Who polices Oakville?

Halton Regional Police Service. Its Regional Headquarters is in Oakville at 2485 North Service Road West, published as open 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Its 2 District Oakville station, also called 20 Division, is at 95 Oak Walk Drive, with published hours of 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Those station hours are not around the clock.

Where does my Oakville speeding ticket go?

To 4085 Palladium Way in Burlington. The provincial listing records a single Halton provincial offences court under ICON code 1260, covering Burlington, Halton Hills, Milton and Oakville. There is no Oakville traffic court and no Milton traffic court. Halton Regional Police publishes the court line as 905-637-1274.

Who prosecutes my Oakville ticket?

It depends who charged you. The Town of Oakville prosecutes offences under the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, the Building Code Act and various Town by-laws enforced by Town staff, and takes disclosure requests at the Town Prosecutors Office on Trafalgar Road. If a police officer issued you a traffic ticket in Oakville, the Town directs your disclosure request to the City of Burlington Prosecutors Office instead.

When should I request disclosure on a provincial offence?

The Town of Oakville asks for disclosure requests six to eight weeks before the trial date. Send it to the right office the first time, because a request that lands at the wrong prosecutor does not start any clock. Arriving at the Burlington courtroom without the material you need is a poor place to begin.

How long will my bail hearing take?

The Ontario Court of Justice practice direction that took effect on 1 June 2026 states that routine contested bail hearings are expected to be completed in no longer than 30 minutes, and consent releases in no longer than 15 minutes, subject to the discretion of the presiding judicial officer. A matter identified as a Complex Bail Matter can receive additional time that will not ordinarily exceed two hours.

Will my bail hearing happen the same day?

That is the stated expectation. The practice direction says all reasonable steps should be taken to accommodate bail hearings, whether or not on consent, on the same day the parties are ready to proceed, and that this applies to weekday bail courts and to Weekend and Statutory Holiday bail courts. It also says all proposed consent releases shall be accommodated the same day.

Do I definitely need a surety?

Not automatically. The practice direction states that release with a surety is only required where the court is satisfied it is the least onerous form of release possible in the circumstances, regardless of onus, and that all parties must consider and propose alternatives to a surety release where appropriate. Where a surety is required to attend, they may attend by audio-video conference unless directed otherwise.

My teenager was caught shoplifting in Oakville. Is a charge automatic?

Not necessarily. Halton Regional Police publishes a Youth Pre-Charge Diversion Program for young people aged 12 to 17, set within the Youth Criminal Justice Act as an extrajudicial measure, and shoplifting is one of the listed offences considered. If the youth completes the terms of the program, a charge is not laid. If the youth does not, the agreement is terminated, the original charge is laid and the matter proceeds to Youth Court.

I have a family case and a criminal charge from the same night. Where do they go?

Both can sit at the Milton Courthouse, but not in the same court. The Ontario Court of Justice hears family cases including decision-making responsibility, parenting time, contact and support, and it does not hear divorce or property cases. The Superior Court of Justice publishes its own family and criminal scheduling at that address. Criminal release conditions take precedence over family arrangements, so the two files need to be handled together.

Kazandji Law's lawyers are licensed by the Law Society of Ontario.