Ajax Criminal Defence Lawyers

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An Ajax charge gets decided by people you have not met yet. A constable out of West Division. A detective in the Criminal Investigation Bureau. A justice of the peace in Oshawa. An assistant Crown attorney, a federal prosecutor who may be someone else entirely, and eventually a judge. Ajax has no criminal courthouse, so every one of them sits somewhere other than Ajax. This page introduces them in the order you meet them, and explains what each can actually do to you, or for you.

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

Ajax has no criminal courthouse. Meet the people who decide anyway.

Ajax does not have a criminal court, and it never has. A Criminal Code charge laid in Ajax is heard in the Ontario Court of Justice at 150 Bond Street East in Oshawa, the location the Court lists as Oshawa (Durham) and which serves the whole of Durham Region. Your first appearance happens there. If you are held, your bail hearing happens there. So do the Crown pre-trial, the judicial pre-trial and, if it goes that far, the trial. The date and the building are printed on whatever the officer handed you, and that piece of paper is the first thing any lawyer will ask to see.

So the honest starting point for an Ajax file isn’t a list of charges. It’s a list of people. Between the roadside and a verdict there are seven or eight individuals who each control one piece of what happens to you, and almost none of them communicate with each other the way clients assume. The arresting constable can’t withdraw your charge. The detective can’t give you bail. The Crown who opposes your release may never run your trial. The justice of the peace who lets you go home has no say at all in your sentence.

Most city pages on this subject list offences and offer a free call. That tells you nothing you can actually use at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. What follows is the cast instead, in roughly the order you meet them, with what each one controls and where you have some leverage.

One structural note before we start. Durham runs its criminal work out of a single building, and there’s a separate page here on Oshawa criminal charges that walks a case through that building in chronological order, from the first night to sentencing. This page deliberately does the opposite. If you want the timeline, read that one too. If you want to know who to worry about and when, stay here. Our neighbouring Pickering and Whitby pages approach the same courthouse from different directions again. All of them sit under our wider criminal defence practice.

Who	Where they sit	What they control
Arresting constable, DRPS West Division	Kingston Road East, Pickering	Whether you are released at the scene, and the conditions on the first document you sign
Criminal Investigation Bureau detective	West Division	The investigation, and the disclosure package your lawyer eventually receives
Justice of the peace	150 Bond Street East, Oshawa	Whether you are released pending trial, and on what terms
Duty counsel	Oshawa courthouse	Free advice and limited help on the day. Not carriage of your file
Assistant Crown attorney	Crown office at the Oshawa courthouse	The Crown position on release, the disclosure, and what resolution is on the table
Federal prosecutor	A separate office. The Court publishes one standing agent specifically for Ajax and Pickering	Drug and other federal charges, run entirely apart from the provincial Crown
Your surety	Wherever they live	Supervision, and the declaration that should be filed before the hearing
Judge	150 Bond Street East, Oshawa	Pre-trial guidance, rulings, trial and sentence

The West Division officer who arrested you

Durham Regional Police Service West Division polices both the Town of Ajax and the City of Pickering, out of a station at 1710 Kingston Road East in Pickering. The division runs three main operational units: Uniform Patrol, a Community Resource Unit and a Criminal Investigation Bureau, supported by crime analysts and civilian station duty operators. If you were arrested on an Ajax street, a West Division officer almost certainly did it.

That officer made one decision that matters more than anything else in the first week. They either released you or they didn’t. A release at the scene usually comes on an undertaking, a document carrying a mandatory condition that you attend court on the date and at the place written on it, and often further conditions: no contact with a named person, a geographic restriction, sometimes a curfew. There may also be a separate date to attend for fingerprints and photographs. Those are two different obligations on one piece of paper and people miss the second one constantly.

If the officer decided not to release you, you were held for a bail hearing in Oshawa. Nothing you say at the station changes that decision after the fact. What you say can, however, end up in the Crown’s synopsis, and the synopsis is one of the three documents the Crown is now expected to put before the court at a contested bail hearing. Silence is not an admission and it is not rudeness. It is the only part of the process you control completely at that point.

Durham Regional Police have announced a new Ajax division, so don’t assume the station named on your paperwork is the one you expect. Read the document. The service, the division and the badge number on it determine who holds your notes, who has your in-car video, and who your lawyer has to chase for the rest of the file. If the charge is an assault offence, the notes taken in the first hour usually matter more than anything said later.

The Criminal Investigation Bureau detective who now owns your file

Arrest is not the end of the investigation. In anything beyond a straightforward roadside matter, the file gets handed to a detective in the Criminal Investigation Bureau, and that person becomes the effective owner of it. They decide which witnesses get re-interviewed, whether a warrant is sought for a phone, whether video is canvassed from nearby businesses before it’s overwritten, and how quickly the disclosure package is assembled and sent to the Crown.

Two things follow from that. The first is that the file can get worse after you’re released. People assume that being let go means the matter is winding down. Quite often it means the opposite: the officer was satisfied you weren’t a flight risk, and the real investigative work started the next morning. Additional charges laid weeks later are not unusual.

The second is that this is the point where most self-inflicted damage happens. A further statement given to be helpful. A message to a complainant to apologise or explain, which in a domestic file is both a breach and a fresh charge. A social media post. A conversation with a friend who later gets interviewed. None of that is recoverable once it’s in the file.

You are entitled to say nothing and to speak to a lawyer. Those rights don’t expire when you leave the station. If a detective calls and asks you to come in for a chat, the correct answer is that your lawyer will call them back, and then to make sure that actually happens. Where the allegation involves communication or contact, as in criminal harassment matters, the temptation to explain yourself directly is strongest and the consequences of doing so are worst.

Disclosure from that detective, routed through the Crown’s office at the Oshawa courthouse, is what your defence is eventually built on. Until it arrives and has been read properly, nobody can honestly tell you what your case is worth. Be suspicious of anyone who does.

The justice of the peace who decides whether you sleep at home tonight

If you were held, the next person who matters is a justice of the peace sitting in the Ontario Court of Justice for Durham. Bail is not a trial. Nobody is deciding whether you did it. The question is whether you can be released pending trial, and on what terms, measured against three statutory grounds: attendance in court, protection of the public, and public confidence in the administration of justice.

The rules changed on 1 June 2026. Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas issued a Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings under Rule 5.1 of the Criminal Rules of the Ontario Court of Justice, replacing the old bail protocol. It’s province-wide, it applies in Durham, and most of the pages you’ll read about bail in Ajax were written before it existed.

The headline is speed. All reasonable steps should be taken to accommodate a bail hearing, consent or contested, on the same day the parties are ready. That applies to weekday bail courts and to weekend and statutory holiday sittings alike. Every proposed consent release put before the court is to be accommodated the same day. The Court has also set time expectations: no longer than thirty minutes for a routine contested hearing, and no longer than fifteen minutes for a consent release, both subject to the presiding judicial officer’s discretion.

Thirty minutes sounds generous until you’ve watched one. It is not enough time to improvise. It’s enough time to present a release plan that somebody prepared properly the night before. That asymmetry is the whole argument for getting counsel involved before the hearing rather than after it. We deal with the mechanics in more detail on our Ontario bail page.

Weekend and statutory holiday bail is heard in a WASH court sitting. Be careful with any website that tells you precisely which building hosts it for Durham. The Court does not publish that list, and firms that name a building are guessing.

Duty counsel: useful, free, and not your lawyer

There is a duty counsel office at the Oshawa courthouse, reachable on 905-728-3801 or at the Legal Aid Ontario tri-county criminal mailbox. Duty counsel are real criminal lawyers, they’re free, and on a first appearance they are genuinely useful. They’ll explain what’s happening, speak to a set date, sometimes run a consent release, and tell you honestly whether what the Crown is offering is sane.

What they can’t do is carry your file. Duty counsel doesn’t have your disclosure, hasn’t spoken to your witnesses, won’t be there next time, and is dealing with a long list of other people that morning. They are a safety net, not a defence. Treating a duty counsel conversation as legal advice about your whole case is one of the more common and more expensive mistakes made in that building.

The distinction matters most at two moments. The first is a contested bail hearing, where preparation done in advance is the difference between release and a week in custody. The second is any conversation that ends with you pleading guilty. A plea entered because it seemed like the quick way out of a long morning is very hard to undo, and the consequences attached to it, including immigration consequences, do not soften later. If status in Canada is in play, read our note on immigration consequences of a conviction before anyone enters a plea on your behalf.

Use duty counsel. Use them on day one, use them to understand the adjournment, and use them to get a straight answer about legal aid eligibility. Just don’t mistake the safety net for the plan.

The Durham Crown, and the bail package you should see in advance

The provincial Crown Attorney’s office for Durham sits in the Oshawa courthouse and can be reached on 905-743-2700. An assistant Crown attorney from that office takes a position on your release, controls disclosure, and decides what resolution, if any, is available. They are not neutral and they are not your enemy. Their job is to prosecute fairly, and a well-prepared defence position gets further with them than an aggressive one.

The June 2026 Practice Direction changed what the Crown owes defence counsel before a bail hearing, and this is the part of the new rules with the most practical value in a Durham file. The Crown is expected to provide defence counsel with a bail package in advance of the hearing. Not at the hearing. In advance of it.

Read that list again. It forces the Crown to commit early and in public to which ground it’s actually running, and a great deal of vague opposition evaporates once someone has to name it. It also means your counsel is expected to arrive with a written plan rather than assemble one from the dock. The new rules reward preparation structurally, which is a polite way of saying they punish the opposite.

Beyond bail, the same office decides what happens to the charge itself. On lower-end matters there may be a diversion or a peace bond route. Our page on peace bonds explains where that fits and, more usefully, where it doesn’t.

The federal prosecutor for Ajax is not the one who handles the rest of Durham

Here is something no competing Ajax page mentions, and it’s checkable in thirty seconds on the Court’s own website. Most drug charges in Canada are federal, prosecuted under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada rather than by the provincial Crown. In many regions the PPSC uses a standing agent, a private firm appointed to run federal prosecutions locally.

For Durham, the Ontario Court of Justice publishes two standing agents rather than one. There’s a general Durham agent, and there’s a second one flagged in the Court’s own wording as being for Ajax and Pickering. We’re not naming the firms or reproducing their contact details here, because that’s not our information to publish. The arrangement itself is the point.

What it means in practice is this. If you were arrested in Ajax one night and picked up both a Criminal Code charge and a drug charge, two entirely separate prosecuting offices now hold pieces of your case. They have different files, different email addresses, different calendars and different instructions. A resolution discussion with the provincial Crown does not bind the federal agent, and vice versa. Neither one will tidy up the other’s charge for you.

Clients discover this the hard way, usually when the Criminal Code matter resolves and they assume everything is over, only to find a federal charge still live and a warrant issued for missing a date nobody reminded them about. It’s an administrative trap rather than a legal one, and it’s entirely avoidable if somebody is tracking both tracks from the start.

The substantive law on the federal side is its own subject. Quantity, packaging, scales, phone contents and the difference between personal possession and an inference of trafficking all drive it. We cover that ground on our drug trafficking page. For an Ajax file, the immediate practical step is simply to establish which office holds which charge before anything else is negotiated.

Your surety, and the declaration filed before anyone testifies

A surety is a person who promises the court they’ll supervise you and who pledges money if you fail to comply. For years the routine in Ontario went like this: bring a surety, put them in the witness box, let the Crown cross-examine them about their savings and their spare room, and hope they hold up. The June 2026 Practice Direction reworked both halves of that routine.

Start with whether you need one at all. The Practice Direction says surety release is only required where the court is satisfied it’s the least onerous form of release possible in the circumstances, and that test applies regardless of who bears the onus. Parties must consider and propose alternatives where appropriate. A lot of people agree to a surety nobody ever required, and then live for two years inside conditions that were never necessary, because no one argued the point.

Where a surety genuinely is the answer, the paperwork now does the work. Defence counsel should prepare the surety declaration, share it with the Crown, and file it before the hearing, sworn and signed where that’s feasible. Where the declaration has been filed, the Court’s stated expectation is that examination in chief and cross-examination of the surety are not required. The surety should still attend so the release can be entered into immediately.

That’s a meaningful shift. It moves the surety’s ordeal from a public cross-examination into a document that gets prepared carefully and in private. It also moves the work forward in time, which is precisely why an unrepresented person or a lawyer retained an hour before the hearing cannot take advantage of it.

Being a surety is a real obligation, not a formality. If the person you’re supervising breaches, you can be called on to forfeit what you pledged, and you can find yourself explaining to a judge why you didn’t report it. Anyone considering it should understand that before signing, not afterwards. Breach allegations are handled differently from the original charge, and we set that out on our failure to comply page.

The judge in case management court, and why represented matters move differently

Between your first appearance and any trial date sits case management court, and this is where the practical difference between having counsel and not having counsel becomes visible rather than theoretical.

The Court currently publishes an Oshawa case management schedule running from 9:00 a.m. through 3:15 p.m., with recesses at 10:30, 11:45 and 3:00 and a lunch break at 1:00. Those blocks are labelled throughout for self-represented accused matters. Counsel matters are handled differently: the Criminal Lawyers Association and the Crown’s office developed virtual counsel sign-up sheets for the Oshawa virtual case management courts, and represented matters are called from those sheets. There’s also a courtroom 106 list published for Friday afternoons with its own connection details.

The effect is straightforward. If you have a lawyer, your matter is on a sheet and gets called in an organised way. If you don’t, you wait in a general list with everyone else, for as long as it takes. Court schedules change, so check the Court’s current Oshawa page rather than relying on any law firm’s description of it, including this one.

On attendance, criminal case management court can generally be attended by video or in person unless a judicial officer directs otherwise, and Oshawa publishes connection details. Guilty pleas are a different matter and are generally in person unless narrow consent conditions are met. We don’t publish meeting identifiers or passcodes here. Get them from the Court.

Case management is also where adjournments accumulate quietly. Each one is reasonable on its own. Six of them are a year. Nobody in that room is responsible for noticing that your file has stopped moving, which brings us to the gap further down this page.

The OPP officer on the 401 who is not a Durham police officer at all

Highway 401 runs the length of the Ajax shoreline corridor, and thousands of Ajax residents are charged on it every year without ever dealing with a Durham officer. Provincial highways in Ontario are patrolled by the Ontario Provincial Police, not by the municipal or regional service. So a stop on the 401 inside Ajax is usually an OPP file, even though Durham Regional Police cover every street either side of it.

The charge is still a criminal matter heard in the Ontario Court of Justice at Oshawa. What changes is everything behind it. A different service holds the notes. A different disclosure process produces the in-car video and the radar or laser calibration records. The officer’s notebook practices, the training records, the maintenance logs on the equipment: all of it comes from a different organisation with a different way of doing things, and a request sent to the wrong one simply sits there.

That distinction bites hardest in driving cases, where the technical record is often the case. Roadside screening device records, the qualifications of the technician, the observation period before a breath sample, and the timing of demands are the places where these files are won or lost. Our pages on dangerous driving, stunt driving and driving offences generally go through what should be in the disclosure and what to do when it isn’t.

Check the top of your paperwork before you assume anything. The service named there decides who your lawyer writes to, which retention policy governs the video you need, and how long you have before it’s gone. Video is routinely overwritten on a fixed schedule. A preservation request sent in week two is worth a great deal more than a complaint in month six.

The Local Administrative Judge, and the readiness court Oshawa does not have

Some Ontario courthouses run a formal trial readiness court, a scheduled sitting whose only purpose is to test whether cases listed for trial are genuinely ready. Oshawa doesn’t. The Ontario Court of Justice states plainly that there’s no formal trial readiness court at this location, and that trial readiness is canvassed in individual cases by the Local Administrative Judge or a designate, as appropriate.

That single line has more effect on how long your case takes than almost anything else on this page. It means nothing pulls your file onto a readiness list automatically. There is no conveyor belt and no clerk whose job it is to notice that your disclosure is incomplete or that your trial estimate was wrong. If your matter drifts, it drifts silently.

What fills the gap is counsel and the pre-trial process. A Crown pre-trial is a discussion between defence and the Crown about the evidence, the issues and whether the matter can resolve. A judicial pre-trial brings a judge in to give both sides a candid, off-the-record read on where the case sits, what a trial would realistically take, and what a reasonable outcome looks like. Those two conversations decide the majority of criminal cases in this province, and neither happens on its own.

Delay isn’t neutral, either. Unreasonable delay can found an application for a stay, but that argument depends heavily on who caused the delay and on a record built contemporaneously. Delay that defence allowed to happen rarely helps defence. Keeping a file moving is both a service to you and, occasionally, a remedy.

If a conviction has already happened and the concern now is what comes next, the routes are different again. Appeal deadlines start running immediately, and a record suspension is a separate process years later.

Us. No Ajax office, no pretending otherwise, and what we actually do

We do not have an office in Ajax. We’re not going to invent one, and you should be wary of any firm whose Ajax page implies a local address that turns out to be a mailbox or a rented boardroom.

It also doesn’t matter very much, and here’s the honest reason why. There is nowhere in Ajax for a criminal lawyer to appear. The work happens at 150 Bond Street East in Oshawa, in the Crown’s office in that building, in written correspondence with West Division and, since 2020, on video for a large share of routine appearances. Proximity to Ajax buys you nothing. Preparation buys you everything.

What we do is straightforward and we’ll tell you the same thing on the phone as on this page. We get the disclosure and read all of it, including the parts that are inconvenient. We identify which prosecuting office holds which charge, which matters in Ajax more than in most places. We prepare a release plan before a bail hearing rather than during one, and we prepare the surety declaration so your surety doesn’t have to be cross-examined. We have the Crown pre-trial with a position rather than a hope. And we tell you plainly, early, when a case is a trial and when it isn’t.

If you’d like a sense of the kind of work that produces, our case results page sets out outcomes we’ve obtained. Past results never predict a future one, and any lawyer who tells you otherwise on a first phone call is selling something.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal defence and family law firm led by Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner. We run matters across the Greater Toronto Area and the surrounding regions, including Durham, and we appear at the courthouse that hears your charge rather than asking you to come to ours.

Our four offices are:

• Toronto (head office). 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which serves clients across York Region.
• North York.
• Oakville.

None of them is in Ajax, and for a matter heard in Oshawa that’s beside the point. Most of a criminal file runs by phone, email and video now: disclosure arrives electronically, case management is frequently virtual, and Crown pre-trials happen on the phone. The parts that require a person in a room are the parts where it matters who that person is.

We take Criminal Code and federal drug matters, bail and bail reviews, breach allegations, driving offences, fraud, theft, weapons, sexual offences and youth matters. First consultations are free and we’ll give you a straight assessment on that call, including when you don’t need us.

Twelve things people in Ajax ask us first

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Durham Region and is not legal advice. Court locations, published schedules and contact routes were current when this page was written and can change, so confirm them with the Ontario Court of Justice before relying on them. Nothing here creates a solicitor and client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied. If you have been charged with an offence in Ajax, get advice about your own facts and your own disclosure.