Markham Criminal Negligence Causing Death Lawyer (s. 220)

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When someone dies on a job site, on a road or in a home in York Region, the same facts can end four different ways: no charge at all, a provincial regulatory prosecution, a driving charge, or a criminal negligence charge under s. 220 of the Criminal Code that carries a maximum of life imprisonment. What sorts the file is not the tragedy. It is degree. Criminal negligence demands the highest fault bar in Canadian criminal law, a marked and substantial departure from what a reasonable person would have done, and holding the Crown to that bar is the defence. Kazandji Law defends these prosecutions at the Newmarket courthouse, with our Thornhill office serving Markham and all of York Region.

Reviewed by Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law · Serving Markham & York Region

One death, four different endings

Every criminal negligence file starts the same way. Something went wrong, someone died, and investigators began working backwards from the outcome. But Ontario law does not treat every fatal mistake as a crime. The same death can produce a civil lawsuit and nothing more, a regulatory prosecution with no criminal record, a driving charge, or a homicide-grade criminal charge. Which ending your file gets depends almost entirely on how far the conduct is said to have fallen below what a reasonable person would have done in the same circumstances.

Section 219 sets the entry point to the criminal lane. A person is criminally negligent who, in doing anything, or in omitting to do anything that it is their legal duty to do, shows wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons. Two parts of that definition matter more than people expect. First, an omission only counts where the law actually imposed a duty. The Criminal Code writes several down: providing necessaries of life to your children, spouse or dependants under your charge (s. 215), using reasonable knowledge, skill and care when you undertake medical treatment or other acts that may endanger life (s. 216), completing an undertaking where abandoning it would endanger life (s. 217), and the duty on anyone who directs how another person does work to take reasonable steps to prevent bodily harm from that work (s. 217.1). And because s. 219 speaks of a duty imposed by law, the net reaches duties found in other statutes and the common law as well. In an omission case, whether any duty existed at all is often the first battleground.

Second, wanton or reckless disregard is a question of degree. Nobody is convicted under s. 220 for being careless. The conduct has to sit at the very top of the fault ladder, and that is what the sorting table below is really measuring.

That table is the strategic map for the whole case. Defence work on a s. 220 file is very often the work of moving the file down it: showing that the conduct belongs in the civil or regulatory rows, or at worst on a lower criminal rung, because the evidence cannot carry the marked and substantial label. The charge the Crown laid on day one is not the last word. The degree question stays live at the preliminary inquiry, at the judicial pre-trial, and in front of the jury.

Degree is the defence, not the tragedy

Criminal negligence sits at the top of Canada's objective fault ladder. Dangerous driving requires a marked departure from how a reasonable driver would have driven. Criminal negligence requires more: a departure that is both marked and substantial. The Supreme Court of Canada has kept those two standards deliberately apart, and the space between them is where most of these prosecutions are actually decided.

Two decisions do the heavy lifting. In R. v. J.F., 2008 SCC 60, the Supreme Court put the standards side by side: failing to provide the necessaries of life takes a marked departure, criminal negligence takes a marked and substantial one, and on the record in that case the Court entered an acquittal on the criminal negligence count. In R. v. Javanmardi, 2019 SCC 54, the Court restored acquittals on criminal negligence and related counts, confirming that the elevated degree of fault is built into the offence and that an accused person's training, qualifications and experience matter when a court asks whether the conduct was objectively dangerous in the first place.

The contrast rungs matter just as much. In R. v. Beatty, 2008 SCC 5 and R. v. Roy, 2012 SCC 26, the Supreme Court held that a momentary lapse of attention behind the wheel will not usually amount even to dangerous driving. If a momentary lapse struggles to meet the lower bar, it cannot meet the higher one. So the central question in a s. 220 prosecution is never answered by pointing at the outcome. A death proves that something terrible happened. It does not prove wanton or reckless disregard. The defence's job, from the first disclosure review to the last closing submission, is to keep the court's eyes on the conduct itself, judged in its real circumstances, and to make the Crown prove degree with evidence rather than with grief.

A workplace death puts you in two courts at once

Markham's construction sites, warehouses, plants and shops are where many of these files begin. Since the Westray amendments, s. 217.1 of the Criminal Code has imposed a legal duty on everyone who undertakes, or has the authority, to direct how another person does work or performs a task: take reasonable steps to prevent bodily harm to that person, or anyone else, arising from the work. A site fatality can therefore ground a criminal negligence charge against a supervisor, a manager or an owner personally, through the omission pathway described above.

What surprises people is that the criminal charge is usually only one of two proceedings. After a workplace death, Ontario's Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development investigates under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and an OHSA prosecution runs in provincial offences court. The police investigation is separate, and it feeds the criminal lane at the Newmarket courthouse. The two tracks have different standards, different procedures and different endpoints, and the criminal lane is by far the graver exposure: a regulatory count cannot produce a criminal record, while s. 220 carries a maximum of life imprisonment.

Running the two files without coordination is dangerous. What you say to a Ministry inspector, what your company's internal investigation writes down, and what surfaces in the regulatory proceeding can all find its way into the criminal disclosure. Before anyone gives an account of a Markham site death, counsel should be positioned across both tracks. And the s. 217.1 duty has edges worth testing: whether you actually directed the work in question, what steps were reasonable in that workplace at that time, and whether the failure the Crown alleges is a marked and substantial departure or a reconstruction built on hindsight.

The fatal collision: which charge gets laid, and why it matters

Fatal driving files sit on the sorting table's sharpest edge. After a death on a York Region road, the Crown has two main criminal options: dangerous operation causing death under s. 320.13(3), which requires a marked departure from the standard of a reasonable driver, and criminal negligence causing death under s. 220, which requires the marked and substantial departure. Both carry a maximum of life imprisonment. The difference between them is the fault bar, and in practice s. 220 is reserved for the driving conduct the Crown views as most egregious.

For the defence, the gap between the standards is the whole fight. A s. 220 driving charge invites two arguments at once: that the conduct does not meet the elevated criminal negligence bar, and that even the lower dangerous driving standard is not made out, because Beatty and Roy hold that momentary lapses and ordinary carelessness are usually not crimes at all. Where the evidence is thinner still, the right landing spot may be a careless driving count under the Highway Traffic Act in provincial offences court, or no charge whatsoever. We cover the provincial lane on our Markham careless driving lawyer page, and the s. 320 criminal driving offences across the province on our Ontario dangerous driving defence page.

Collision files are also expert files. Reconstruction opinions, vehicle data downloads, sight-line measurements and road-condition evidence usually decide whether the departure was marked, marked and substantial, or nothing criminal at all. Those opinions can and should be tested by defence experts, and that work goes better the earlier it starts, while the scene evidence and the data are still intact.

The rung above: when the Crown calls it manslaughter

Criminal negligence causing death does not sit alone at the top of the sorting table. Under s. 222(5) of the Criminal Code, culpable homicide is manslaughter where death is caused by an unlawful act or by criminal negligence, so the very same conduct that supports a s. 220 count can be charged as manslaughter instead. The two offences even share the same penalty structure: life imprisonment at the top, and a four-year minimum where a firearm is used. Which count appears on the information is a charging choice, and it is a choice your lawyer should scrutinize rather than accept.

The Supreme Court's decision in Creighton frames unlawful act manslaughter around the objective foreseeability of non-trivial bodily harm, a different analysis from the wanton and reckless disregard that s. 219 demands. The counts overlap, but they are not interchangeable, and the choice shapes how the trial runs. If your file has been charged as manslaughter, or the Crown is weighing the two, start with our Markham manslaughter lawyer page, which owns the line between manslaughter and murder. And where a York Region death investigation has gone further still, our Markham homicide lawyer page maps the full homicide ladder.

The death still has to be traced to you

Degree gets the attention, but s. 220 has a second element that quietly decides cases: causation. The section punishes a person who, by criminal negligence, causes the death of another person. The Crown must connect the conduct it criticizes to the death itself, and in the real world that connection is often contested ground.

Think about how these files actually look. A workplace death may involve equipment maintained by one company, operated by another, on a site directed by a third, with safety systems that failed at more than one point. A fatal collision may involve two drivers' decisions, road design, lighting and weather. A death in a home may involve an underlying medical condition that the pathology cannot cleanly separate from the events. When several actors and several failures stand between the accused and the outcome, whose conduct caused the death is not a formality. It is a triable issue.

That is why independent expert work starts early in a properly defended s. 220 file: pathology review, engineering analysis, collision reconstruction, whatever the evidence demands. The Crown built its causation theory with its own experts long before the charge was laid. The defence cannot test that theory with cross-examination alone. It needs its own science, and the physical evidence is freshest in the first weeks after the event.

Life at the top, one surviving minimum, and no program exit

Honest numbers first. Criminal negligence causing death is a straight indictable offence. In the ordinary case, s. 220(b) sets a maximum of life imprisonment with no mandatory minimum, which means sentencing turns on the circumstances and the sentencing principles rather than on a statutory floor. Where a firearm is used in the offence, s. 220(a) imposes a minimum of four years. That minimum is one of the survivors of the 2022 sentencing reforms: Bill C-5 repealed a number of firearm minimums elsewhere in the Code, but it did not touch s. 220(a), and the Supreme Court upheld the four-year floor in R. v. Morrisey in 2000. Constitutional challenges to mandatory minimums continue to develop case by case, but as the law stands, the floor is in the Code.

The companion charge matters too. Criminal negligence causing bodily harm, s. 221, is a hybrid offence with a ten-year maximum on indictment. Where someone survived with serious injuries, s. 221 is the count you will usually see, and a single incident with both a death and injured survivors can carry both sections on one information.

A conviction carries consequences beyond the sentence. Firearms prohibition orders are routinely in play on conviction for an offence of this gravity, and the length and scope depend on how the conviction is framed, so get specific advice rather than assumptions. For non-citizens the stakes are immediate: because the maximum is life, a conviction is serious criminality under s. 36(1)(a) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act no matter what sentence is imposed, and permanent residents can lose status. Immigration advice belongs inside the defence plan from the start, not after a plea.

The investigation you are already in

By the time most people call a lawyer, the investigation has been running for days or weeks. Death investigations in York Region are built to a homicide grade: specialized York Regional Police investigators work these files, the Homicide Unit is engaged where a death is being investigated as a culpable homicide, and collision investigators handle fatal crash scenes. Expect scene forensics, seized equipment and vehicles, video canvasses, phone records and long witness lists. Markham files are processed through #5 District at 8700 McCowan Rd., which polices Markham and Whitchurch-Stouffville.

Understand your position inside that machine. Investigators interview witnesses. They also interview people who later become accused, and the line between the two moves without notice. So the rule is simple: do not explain the incident, to the police, to a Ministry inspector, or to your employer's investigators, before you have legal advice. A cooperative account given in the first week is still a statement, and in a degree-driven prosecution the Crown will read every sentence of it for admissions about what you knew, what you skipped and what you decided.

The defence has its own work in that same window: preserve records, texts, training logs and maintenance histories before they age away; identify witnesses while memories are fresh; and get the disclosure and expert pipeline moving. In a case where the whole question is how far conduct departed from a reasonable standard, the side that understands the technical evidence first holds the advantage.

Bail, the preliminary inquiry and the Newmarket route

Criminal negligence causing death is not a s. 469 offence, so bail is decided by the Ontario Court of Justice serving York Region, with the Crown ordinarily bearing the onus. Everything in a York Region prosecution runs through one address: the Newmarket courthouse at 50 Eagle St. W., which houses the OCJ for bail, case management and preliminary inquiries, and the Superior Court of Justice for jury trials in the same building. Markham has no criminal courthouse. The OCJ runs weekend and holiday bail courts, and under the current bail practice direction sureties can attend by audio-video, which matters when family members need to step up quickly.

Because the maximum is life, you can request a preliminary inquiry, a stage now reserved for the most serious charges. A Newmarket prelim lets the defence test the Crown's causation and degree evidence under oath, pin down the expert opinions, and build a transcript record before a Superior Court jury ever hears the case. Bail conditions follow the s. 515 framework, and counsel's job is a release plan the court can trust: residence, sureties where needed, and terms that let you keep working while the case runs. Jordan sets the presumptive time ceilings at 18 months in the OCJ and 30 months in the SCJ, and much of the long middle of a case now moves through virtual case-management courts, so routine appearances rarely cost you a workday. Bail has its own strategy and its own urgency; our Markham bail lawyer page covers it in detail.

Why Markham clients call Kazandji Law

A s. 220 file is a degree fight, and degree fights are won with preparation: disclosure mastered, experts retained early, and a Crown made to prove every element rather than ride the momentum of a tragedy. That is how we build these defences.

• Thornhill office, minutes from Markham. 7191 Yonge St., Suite 310 is the firm's closest office to Markham and York Region, with the Newmarket courthouse a straight run up the highway.
• Four offices across the GTA. Toronto headquarters at 180 John St., Unit 320, plus North York and Oakville, so meeting us fits your life, not the other way around.
• Founding partner attention. Fadi Matthew Kazandji leads the defence personally, from the first police contact through prelim and trial.
• Straight answers. If the Crown's degree evidence is weak, we say so and fight. If the safest exit is a reduced count on the lower rungs of the table, we say that too. You get our honest read, not a script.

See how we have handled serious files on our case results page, and if you are still mapping the charge itself, the Markham criminal defence overview is the place to start. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes; every case turns on its own evidence.

Criminal negligence causing death FAQ

This page is general legal information for people facing criminal negligence charges in Ontario. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create a lawyer and client relationship. Criminal Code provisions cited were checked against the Justice Laws consolidation current to May 26, 2026 (last amended March 26, 2026); the law changes, and every case turns on its own facts. For advice about your situation, call Kazandji Law at 647-588-3234 for a free consultation.