Mississauga Criminal Defence Lawyers

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If you have been charged in Mississauga, your case is going to Brampton. Peel Region has one Ontario Court of Justice location for criminal matters and it sits at 7755 Hurontario Street, in the A. Grenville and William Davis Courthouse. There is a courthouse in Mississauga, on Burnhamthorpe Road West, and it is the wrong building for a Criminal Code charge. Knowing that on day one saves you a wasted morning and sometimes a bench warrant.

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

Your charge says Mississauga, so why does the paperwork say Brampton?

Mississauga has no criminal court of its own. That catches almost everyone by surprise. Pull up the Ontario Court of Justice list of locations and there is no Mississauga entry on it. Peel Region has one criminal court location, and it is in Brampton.

The building is officially the A. Grenville and William Davis Courthouse, 7755 Hurontario Street, Brampton. Most people just call it the Brampton courthouse. Court staff will know what you mean either way. The Ontario Court of Justice sits there. So does the Superior Court of Justice. For administrative purposes Peel belongs to the Central West Region of the Ontario Court of Justice, grouped with Hamilton, Halton, Orangeville, Simcoe, Brantford, Cayuga, St. Catharines and Welland.

What that means in practice is straightforward. The officer who stopped you on Dundas Street or Eglinton Avenue works out of a Mississauga division. The charge was laid in Mississauga. Your release paperwork may well say Mississauga at the top. And then the date at the bottom of that form sends you north up Hurontario Street into a different city.

None of that is an error and none of it is worth arguing about at the counter. It is simply how the region is organised. But it does mean that every piece of advice about where to go, when to be there, and who to speak to has to be anchored to Brampton rather than to the city on your driver's licence. People lose court dates over this. Not often, but often enough that it is the first thing we say to a new Mississauga client.

If you are reading this the night before a court date and you are not certain where you are supposed to be, the answer is 7755 Hurontario Street in Brampton. Bring every page the police gave you. Get there early enough to clear the security line, because that line is real and it does not care that you were on time for the parking lot.

There is a courthouse on Burnhamthorpe Road. Here's why it isn't yours.

Search for a Mississauga courthouse and you will land on 950 Burnhamthorpe Road West. It is a real court. It is open Monday to Friday, 8:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon. It has a phone number, a counter and a docket. It is also, for a Criminal Code charge, completely the wrong place.

That building is the Provincial Offences Court for Mississauga, run by the City. In the City's own description, provincial offence tickets are issued for violations under the Highway Traffic Act, the Trespass to Property Act and all other provincial acts. Ontario lists it among the municipal Provincial Offences Court locations across the province. Speeding, careless driving, failing to surrender a permit, trespass matters, a long list of provincial statutes. That is its work.

A Criminal Code charge is a different creature entirely, and it belongs to the Ontario Court of Justice. For Peel Region that court sits in Brampton. Put those two facts side by side and the conclusion is unavoidable: your assault charge, your theft charge, your impaired driving charge under the Criminal Code, none of them are heard on Burnhamthorpe Road.

There is a third thing that gets confused with both. Parking tickets and municipal by-law penalty notices in Mississauga go to the City's Administrative Penalty System, not to the Provincial Offences Court at all. Three different processes, three different destinations, and one word, courthouse, doing far too much work.

Here is the plain test. If a police officer laid the charge and the paperwork refers to the Criminal Code, you are going to Brampton. If a provincial offences officer handed you a ticket under the Highway Traffic Act, Burnhamthorpe is likely correct. If you cannot tell which one you have, that is a fifteen minute phone call and not a reason to guess.

What the A. Grenville and William Davis Courthouse actually contains

The Brampton courthouse is not a single-purpose criminal building. It holds most of the justice system for Peel Region under one roof, which is useful to understand because it explains why the place is busy and why the signage matters.

Ontario lists the following services at 7755 Hurontario Street: civil, criminal, criminal youth, the Crown Attorney's Office, Divisional Court, enforcement, family, the Victim and Witness Assistance Program, and small claims. The Superior Court of Justice sits in the same building as the Ontario Court of Justice. There is no separate family court location in Mississauga either, so Peel family matters in the Superior Court are heard at the same address.

One detail worth memorising. Small claims is at 7765 Hurontario Street, one street number up from the criminal courthouse. That single digit has sent more than one person to the wrong front door.

Because the Crown Attorney's Office is inside the same building, the prosecutor assigned to your file is not somewhere across the region. That has practical consequences. Disclosure requests, resolution discussions and Crown pre-trials all run through one office, and a lawyer who appears there regularly knows how that office screens files and who to ask about what.

The Victim and Witness Assistance Program is also on site. If you have been charged in a domestic matter, the complainant in your case may be in contact with that office, and that contact can shape the Crown's position on release conditions and on resolution. Knowing the program exists and sits in the same building is part of understanding why things move the way they do.

Someone was arrested in Mississauga last night. Where are they right now?

This is the section people actually arrive here for, usually at two in the morning, usually a parent or a partner.

If someone was arrested in Mississauga tonight, they are most likely being held at a Peel Regional Police division. The Mississauga divisions are 11 Division at 3030 Erin Mills Parkway and 12 Division at 4600 Dixie Road. There is also Airport Division at 2951 Convair Drive, which covers Toronto Pearson International Airport. Which one depends on where the arrest happened.

Peel Regional Police states that an accused person is brought before the court within twenty four hours of arrest. Two things can happen before that. The officer in charge can release the person on an undertaking with conditions, in which case they walk out with a future court date. Or the police can hold the person for a bail hearing, which is what happens on more serious allegations, on domestic files, and where there is a record of failing to attend court or breaching conditions.

If there is a hearing, it happens at the Brampton courthouse. Legal Aid Ontario runs Brampton Criminal Duty Counsel out of Room 110 at 7755 Hurontario Street, and duty counsel can assist at a bail hearing. Duty counsel is a genuine safety net and it is not the same thing as having your own lawyer prepare a release plan, line up a surety, and argue the plan to a justice.

One more practical point. Property seized at the time of arrest, a phone, a vehicle, cash, generally stays with the investigating division rather than travelling to the courthouse. If you are trying to recover something, the division is where that conversation starts.

Peel Regional Police, the OPP, and why it matters which one stopped you

Mississauga clients are not all dealing with the same police service, and the difference shows up in the disclosure long before it shows up anywhere else.

Peel Regional Police serves the cities of Mississauga and Brampton, and it polices Toronto Pearson International Airport. That is the service behind most charges laid on municipal roads in the city. The Ontario Provincial Police patrols all provincial highways, including the 400 series. So a charge laid on the 401, the 403, the 410, the 427 or the QEW may well be an OPP file even though every kilometre of that road sits inside Mississauga.

Same courthouse either way. Your case still goes to Brampton. What changes is the organisation on the other side of the file.

• Different notebooks and different formats. Officer notes, use of force reports and continuity records follow each service's own practice.
• Different video. In car camera systems, body worn camera policies and retention periods are not identical between services.
• Different witnesses. The officers you would cross examine come from a different command structure with different training and different internal policies.
• Different disclosure routes. Requests for outstanding material go to a different place, and the time that takes is not the same.

This matters most in driving cases, where the quality of the stop, the grounds for the demand and the timing recorded in the notes can decide the whole file. If you were stopped on a highway and charged with dangerous driving, the technical detail in the officer's notes is often where the case lives or dies. We cover the substantive law on that in our dangerous driving defence pages.

One correction while we are here, because it trips people up. 22 Division at 7750 Hurontario Street is a Brampton division, not a Mississauga one, even though the street name is familiar to every Mississauga resident. Hurontario Street runs a long way. And Peel does not have a 5 Division. The airport unit is called Airport Division.

What the Crown in Brampton sees before you ever walk in

By the time you walk into the Brampton courthouse for the first time, your file has already been read by somebody. Understanding what that person is looking at changes how you think about the next few months.

The Crown Attorney's Office for Peel is inside 7755 Hurontario Street. What the assigned Crown receives is a package from the investigating service: the synopsis, the officer's notes, statements, any video, the criminal record if there is one, and the charge screening decision. Ontario Crowns work from a screening standard that asks two questions. Is there a reasonable prospect of conviction, and is a prosecution in the public interest. Those two questions sit underneath every conversation that follows.

The synopsis is worth singling out. It is a short narrative written by police, and it is the first version of your story that anyone at the courthouse reads. It is not evidence. It is frequently incomplete, and sometimes it is simply wrong. But it frames the file, and correcting that framing early, with material rather than argument, is one of the more useful things defence counsel does.

Not every prosecution in Brampton is run by the provincial Crown. Drug prosecutions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are conducted federally, by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Different office, different policies on resolution, different people. If you are facing a possession or trafficking allegation out of Peel, you are negotiating with a federal prosecutor, and that changes what is realistic. Our drug offence lawyers deal with both streams.

What you can do about any of this is narrower than people hope but it is not nothing. You can make sure the Crown has the material that is actually helpful to you, at the point when positions are still soft. A letter with medical records, employment information, counselling already under way, or a video the police never pulled, delivered before the first Crown pre-trial, lands very differently than the same material produced eight months later.

The first appearance, and why it's shorter than you expect

People rehearse for their first appearance. They shouldn't. It is almost always the shortest and least consequential court date of the entire case.

A first appearance in the Ontario Court of Justice is an administrative step. The court confirms you are there, confirms whether you have counsel or need time to get counsel, and sets the next date so that disclosure can be requested and reviewed. Nobody runs a defence that morning. Nobody should be entering a plea that morning. The case has not been read yet, by you or by anyone acting for you.

On many Ontario Court of Justice matters your lawyer can appear on your behalf for routine remands and set dates, which means you are not burning a vacation day to stand in a Brampton courtroom for two minutes. Some appearances do require you personally, and a Superior Court trial certainly does. The useful thing is being told clearly which is which, in advance, instead of finding out on the morning.

Two mistakes recur at this stage, and both are avoidable. The first is pleading early to make it stop. On a summary matter with a plausible defence, an early plea can close off a discharge, a diversion, or a withdrawal that was genuinely available three months later. The second is treating the release conditions as a formality. Conditions are enforceable the moment they are signed, and a breach becomes a fresh charge that is often harder to defend than the original one. That is true whether the underlying allegation is a simple assault or something considerably more serious.

What actually matters in the weeks after the first appearance is disclosure. Getting it, reading all of it, identifying what is missing, and asking for the missing material in writing so there is a record. That work is unglamorous and it is where cases are won.

Ontario Court of Justice or Superior Court? Same building, very different case

At some point in a serious file somebody will use the word election, and the room will assume you know what it means. Here is the short version.

Most criminal matters start and finish in the Ontario Court of Justice. Summary conviction offences stay there. So do a great many indictable matters, because the accused elects to be tried by a provincial court judge and that is frequently the sensible choice. Where the charge is indictable, though, you may have the right to elect trial by a judge of the Superior Court of Justice sitting alone, or by a judge and jury.

In Peel, both courts are in the same building. The address on your notice does not change when the case moves up. Almost everything else does.

• Preliminary inquiry. Available on a narrower set of charges than it once was, and a real strategic question rather than an automatic step.
• Timelines. Superior Court matters run to a longer ceiling, which affects delay arguments and affects how long you live with your conditions.
• Procedure. Pre-trial applications, notice requirements and the conduct of the trial itself are more formal.
• Exposure. The charges that end up there carry the heaviest consequences in the system.

The election is a strategic decision and it is not one to make at a counter or on the advice of somebody in the hallway. It turns on the strength of the Crown's case, on whether there is a live Charter issue, on whether a jury is likely to see the allegation the way a judge would, and on how much delay you can live with. Charges such as sexual offences and large fraud allegations are the ones where that calculation gets hardest, because the evidence is dense and the stakes are permanent.

Get the election wrong and you cannot simply undo it. Re-election is possible in defined circumstances and with consent in others, but it is not a free move. This is a decision to make once, deliberately, with the disclosure in front of you.

Getting to Brampton on a weekday morning, and what happens if you're late

Nobody writes about the commute, and the commute is the part that actually interferes with people's lives.

Hurontario Street runs north out of Mississauga and into Brampton, and the courthouse sits on it at number 7755. Whether you take Hurontario the whole way, or cut across on the 403 and the 410, you are making a cross-region trip on a weekday morning into a city with its own rush hour. Add parking. Add the security screening line at the front doors. Add the time it takes to find the right courtroom in a building that also runs family, civil, small claims and Divisional Court.

Being late is not a neutral event. If your matter is called and you are not there, the court can issue a bench warrant. That is a warrant for your arrest, and it turns a manageable file into a file with a failure to appear attached to it. Failure to appear is a separate offence, and the charge tends to follow you into every subsequent bail and sentencing discussion as evidence that you do not keep your commitments to the court. A traffic jam is a bad reason to acquire one.

The practical answers are unromantic. Leave earlier than you think you need to. Have the courtroom number before you arrive, not after. If you are genuinely stuck, call your lawyer immediately rather than at noon, because counsel who is already in the building can often speak to the matter and hold it down before it is called.

And this is the real reason to have counsel appear on routine dates. Most set dates and remands do not require your physical presence. Over the life of a file that can be the difference between keeping your job and explaining to an employer, six or seven times, why you need another morning off.

Charges that come out of Pearson, and why they're their own category

Toronto Pearson International Airport is physically in Mississauga, and that single geographic fact creates a category of charge that behaves differently from everything else in the city.

The airport is policed by Peel Regional Police Airport Division at 2951 Convair Drive. So an arrest at Pearson is, for court purposes, a Peel matter, and it goes to the Brampton courthouse like any other Peel charge. That much is simple.

What is not simple is everything sitting on top of it. Airport files frequently involve federal subject matter. Drug importing and exporting allegations under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are prosecuted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, not the provincial Crown, so the office you are negotiating with is different from the office handling a street level charge in Mississauga. Allegations involving prohibited items raise their own complications, and a client facing a firearms charge out of an airport search is dealing with evidence gathered in a setting where the rules about screening and consent are not the ordinary ones.

There are consequences that sit outside the criminal court entirely. For anyone who is not a Canadian citizen, an airport charge can trigger immigration attention at the worst possible moment. For anyone whose work requires clearance to airside areas, or who travels for a living, a charge can affect employment long before a court decides anything. Those consequences need to be in the strategy from the first week, not raised at sentencing.

If you have been charged at Pearson, the first thing to establish is who is prosecuting. Provincial Crown and federal Crown run on different policies, and the answer changes what a realistic resolution looks like.

What it costs you to guess wrong about the courthouse, the court, or the plea

A criminal charge costs you things that do not appear on any sentence. Some of them come from the charge. Some of them come from decisions people make in the first month because nobody explained the alternatives.

Go to the wrong building and you lose a day, and if the matter is called in your absence you can pick up a bench warrant and a failure to appear charge. Guess wrong on the election and you commit to a track you cannot casually reverse. Plead early to make the stress stop and you may close off a discharge, a diversion program or a peace bond resolution that would have left you without a record.

The record is the part people underestimate. A conviction shows up on police record checks, and a vulnerable sector check goes further than that. It affects licensing in regulated professions, nursing, teaching, security work, financial services, the trades that require bonding. It affects volunteer positions in schools and hospitals. It affects immigration status and applications for permanent residence or citizenship. And it affects travel, particularly to the United States, where admissibility is decided by another country under its own rules regardless of what an Ontario judge thought was fair. Even a relatively modest theft conviction can close doors for years.

Cleaning it up afterwards is possible but slow. A record suspension has eligibility waiting periods that run from the completion of the entire sentence, including fines and probation, and it does not erase the record so much as set it aside. Our record suspension lawyers can explain the timelines, but the honest advice is that preventing the conviction is worth far more than the cleanup.

None of this is an argument for panic. It is an argument for making the early decisions with information rather than with instinct, because the early decisions are the ones with the longest tail.

Why a Toronto firm drives to Brampton for Mississauga clients

We are a Toronto criminal defence firm. We do not have an office in Mississauga and we are not going to invent one.

Plenty of firms will tell a Mississauga client they are local. Look closely and the address is a mailbox, or a meeting room rented by the hour, or it is simply not mentioned at all. We would rather say the true thing, which is this: for a Mississauga charge, a local address buys you nothing. Your case is not heard in Mississauga. It is heard at 7755 Hurontario Street in Brampton, and what helps you is a lawyer who is standing in that building on the right morning, who has read every page of your disclosure, and who knows how the Crown's office there screens files.

That is the work. Reading disclosure properly. Spotting the gap in the continuity of an exhibit. Noticing that the grounds for the demand are thinner than the synopsis implies. Getting material in front of a Crown while positions are still movable. Preparing a release plan a justice will actually accept rather than one that sounds good in the hallway. Appearing on routine dates so a client does not lose another shift.

Kazandji Law defends criminal charges across the Greater Toronto Area, and Peel is part of that work. If you want the wider picture of how we run files, our criminal defence practice page is the place to start. If you want to talk about your own charge, the consultation is free and it is confidential, and it is more useful the earlier it happens.

Why Kazandji Law

Four offices across the Greater Toronto Area, none of them in Mississauga. We travel to the court that hears your case.

• Toronto, head office. 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which serves our Markham and York Region clients.
• North York. For clients in the north end of the city.
• Oakville. Our westernmost office, and the closest one to Mississauga, serving Halton and the western GTA.

Fadi Matthew Kazandji is the founding partner. The firm is built around criminal defence, with a family law practice alongside it, and the criminal work covers the full range: bail, driving offences, assault and domestic matters, drugs, weapons, fraud and property offences, sexual offences, youth matters and appeals.

What you should expect from us is plain speech about what your case is worth, an honest answer when the answer is not the one you wanted, and someone in the courtroom who has actually read the file. You can see a selection of case results on our site. We do not publish guarantees, because nobody who has practised criminal law for any length of time would offer you one.

For a Mississauga charge, that means appearing at the A. Grenville and William Davis Courthouse in Brampton, working with the Crown Attorney's Office in that building, and dealing with Peel Regional Police or the OPP depending on who laid the charge.

Mississauga criminal charges: twelve questions we get asked

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Peel Region and it is not legal advice. Reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. Court locations, office hours and contact details change, so confirm anything time sensitive with the court before you rely on it. If you have been charged, speak with a lawyer about your own circumstances.