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Whitby is full of justice system buildings. Durham’s regional police headquarters is here. So is the Region’s provincial offences court, at the same street address. So is Ontario Shores, where courts across this part of the province send people for forensic assessment. What Whitby does not have is a criminal court. Every Criminal Code charge laid in this town is heard twenty minutes east, in Oshawa. This page walks the buildings one at a time, explains what each actually does, and ends where your case really lives.

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

Whitby has a police headquarters, a court office and a forensic hospital

Few towns of this size carry as much justice system infrastructure as Whitby does. Durham Regional Police run their headquarters here. The Region of Durham runs its Provincial Offences Court Services here, out of the same address. Durham Regional Police Central West Division operates from Taunton Road East. Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, which conducts court-ordered forensic assessments, is here as well.

And not one of those places will hear your criminal charge.

Criminal Code matters arising in Whitby go to the Ontario Court of Justice at 150 Bond Street East in Oshawa, which the Court lists as Oshawa (Durham) and which serves the entire region. That is where your first appearance happens, where a bail hearing happens if you are held, where the Crown pre-trial happens, and where any trial happens.

People get this wrong in both directions. Some assume the big building on Rossland Road with police vehicles outside must be where court happens. Others assume that because Whitby has no criminal court, the matter must somehow be Toronto’s. Neither is right, and the confusion costs people missed dates and wasted mornings. So this page is organised as a tour. Each section is a place. We work through what each building does, who works in it, what it can and cannot decide, and then we leave Whitby, because that is what your file does.

Address	What is there	What it handles	What it does not
605 Rossland Road East	Durham Regional Police headquarters	Regional police administration and command	Hears no charges of any kind
605 Rossland Road East	Region of Durham Provincial Offences Court Services	Tickets and provincial offences. Open 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, excluding holidays	No Criminal Code matters
480 Taunton Road East	DRPS Central West Division	Policing and investigation for the Town of Whitby	Not a court. Holds disclosure, does not release it directly to you
Whitby	Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences	Court-ordered forensic assessment and treatment on referral	Decides nothing about guilt or innocence
150 Bond Street East, Oshawa	Ontario Court of Justice, Oshawa (Durham)	Every Criminal Code charge from Whitby, bail included	Is not in Whitby

Two neighbouring pages take different routes through the same region: our Ajax page works through the people who decide a Durham file, and the Pickering page works through situations you might be in. Both sit under our criminal defence practice.

605 Rossland Road East: two institutions at one address

This is the address that causes more confusion in Whitby than any other, and the reason is a genuine coincidence of geography rather than anything anyone designed.

Durham Regional Police Service headquarters is at 605 Rossland Road East, Whitby. The regional non-emergency line is 1-888-579-1520. That is the administrative and command centre for policing across the whole of Durham Region, not a local station and not a place where charges are heard.

The Region of Durham also runs its Provincial Offences Court Services from 605 Rossland Road East, Whitby, under a separate post office box. Office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, excluding holidays. There is an after-hours drop box beside the south entrance on the lower level, for fine payments and court documents. Do not put cash in it.

So one street address holds the regional police headquarters and the Region’s ticket court. A person who receives a piece of paper with 605 Rossland Road East on it reasonably assumes it covers everything. It does not. Provincial offences and Criminal Code offences are two separate systems, with different statutes, different procedures, different prosecutors and different consequences, and they are heard in different buildings twenty minutes apart.

The distinction that actually matters is this. A provincial offence is not a crime and does not produce a criminal record. A Criminal Code conviction does, and a criminal record follows you into employment screening, into volunteer vetting, into travel, and for anyone without citizenship, into immigration consequences that can be far more serious than the sentence. If you are holding a document and cannot tell which system you are in, that is the first thing to resolve, and it takes a lawyer about ninety seconds.

What the counter at 605 Rossland can do for you, and what it cannot

Worth being concrete, because people spend real mornings in the wrong queue.

The Provincial Offences counter at 605 Rossland Road East deals with matters under provincial statutes and municipal by-laws. Highway Traffic Act charges. Parking and by-law matters. Liquor licensing offences. Trespass to property. You can pay a fine there, file documents, and deal with the administrative side of a ticket. The after-hours drop box takes documents and payments other than cash.

What that counter cannot do is anything at all about a criminal charge. Staff there cannot tell you your criminal court date, cannot accept a document for a criminal file, cannot explain a release condition, cannot arrange a bail hearing and cannot put you in front of a justice of the peace on a Criminal Code matter. They are not being unhelpful. It is a different court system and they have no access to it.

Nor, incidentally, can the police headquarters at the same address hand you your disclosure. Disclosure on a criminal charge is assembled by the investigating division and provided through the Crown Attorney’s office at the Oshawa courthouse, normally to counsel. Turning up at a police building and asking for your file does not work, and the attempt occasionally creates its own problems.

One genuine overlap is worth knowing. Some driving conduct can be charged either provincially or criminally depending on how bad it was and what the officer decided. Careless driving is a Highway Traffic Act offence. Dangerous driving is a Criminal Code offence. The underlying facts can look similar from the roadside and the consequences are not remotely comparable. Our careless driving and dangerous driving pages explain where that line sits and why which side you land on matters so much.

480 Taunton Road East: the division that investigates Whitby

Durham Regional Police Central West Division operates from 480 Taunton Road East, Whitby. It is responsible for policing the Town of Whitby, along with the northern boundaries of the City of Oshawa. Its catchment also takes in the Durham College and Ontario Tech University campuses in north Oshawa, Durham Region headquarters, Durham Region EMS headquarters, the Durham District School Board and Ontario Shores.

If you were arrested in Whitby, this is the division holding your file. That matters for one practical reason above all others: disclosure. The officer’s notes, the statements, any in-car or body-worn video, the photographs, the forensic material and the continuity records are all assembled by this division and routed through the Crown at the Oshawa courthouse.

Video is the piece with a clock on it. Police services operate retention schedules, and footage that nobody requests gets overwritten on a fixed cycle. Nearby private security and business camera footage disappears faster still, often within days or a couple of weeks. A preservation request made early is one of the few genuinely time-critical steps in a defence file, and it is routinely missed by people who wait to see how things develop.

The other thing to understand about a division is that its interest in you does not end at release. Investigations continue. Detectives re-interview witnesses, seek warrants for devices, and canvass for video after the fact. Additional charges laid weeks later are common. Being released is not a signal that the matter is fading, and it is emphatically not an invitation to contact anyone involved or to post about it.

Say nothing further without advice. That right does not expire when you walk out of the station, and it is the single most valuable thing you retain at that point.

The drive to Oshawa, and what 150 Bond Street East actually is

This is where the tour leaves Whitby, and it is where your case has been the whole time.

The Ontario Court of Justice for Durham sits at 150 Bond Street East, Oshawa, Ontario L1G 0A2. The Court lists it as Oshawa (Durham). The general court line is 905-743-2640. The provincial Crown Attorney’s office for the region operates from that building on 905-743-2700, and the Oshawa duty counsel office is reachable on 905-728-3801.

Every stage of a Whitby criminal charge happens there. First appearance. Bail. Case management. Crown pre-trial. Judicial pre-trial. Trial. Sentencing. There is no Whitby stage of the process, which is why a firm advertising a Whitby address is advertising something that has no bearing on your file.

On scheduling, the Court currently publishes an Oshawa case management schedule running from 9:00 a.m. through 3:15 p.m., with the blocks labelled for self-represented accused matters, while counsel matters are called from virtual sign-up sheets developed by the Criminal Lawyers Association together with the Crown’s office. A courtroom 106 list is published for Friday afternoons. Court schedules change and the Court’s own Oshawa page is the authority, not any law firm’s summary of it.

One structural point that shapes timelines more than people expect. Oshawa has no formal trial readiness court. The Court states that trial readiness is canvassed in individual cases by the Local Administrative Judge or a designate, as appropriate. Nothing pulls your file onto a readiness list automatically. If it stalls, it stalls quietly, and only counsel pushing the pre-trials will notice.

Attendance can generally be by video for case management unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. Guilty pleas are generally in person. A chronological walk through this building, from a first night in custody to sentencing, is set out on our Oshawa page.

When a Whitby bail hearing stops being routine

Bail in Durham is heard at the Oshawa courthouse, and since 1 June 2026 it runs under a new Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings, issued by Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas under Rule 5.1 of the Criminal Rules of the Ontario Court of Justice. It replaced the old bail protocol and applies across Ontario.

Most of it is about speed. Hearings should be accommodated on the same day the parties are ready. Consent releases are to be accommodated the same day, full stop. The Court has set time expectations of no longer than thirty minutes for a routine contested hearing and fifteen minutes for a consent release, both subject to the presiding judicial officer’s discretion. Weekend and statutory holiday matters are heard in a WASH court sitting. The Court does not publish which building hosts weekend bail for Durham, so be wary of any site that names one.

Thirty minutes is workable for a straightforward matter. It is nowhere near enough for a complicated one, and the Practice Direction recognises that by creating a category the old protocol did not have.

Two or more features. One on its own does not do it. That threshold is the part people miss, and it is why the designation needs someone to actually raise it rather than hope it is noticed.

The practical difference between thirty minutes and two hours is the difference between a hearing where a surety plan gets properly explored and one where it gets compressed into a summary nobody has time to test. If your situation has two of those features, saying so early is among the most useful things counsel can do in the first twenty-four hours. The general mechanics of the hearing are on our Ontario bail page.

Two sureties, an interpreter, or a breach: how a hearing earns extra time

Worth taking the four features one at a time, because each tends to arrive with its own misconception.

Two or more sureties the Crown wants to cross-examine. Bringing more sureties is not automatically better. Each one the Crown wishes to question adds time and adds risk, because a surety who performs poorly under cross-examination can damage a plan that would have succeeded with one solid supervisor. The Practice Direction also changed the default here: where defence counsel prepares the surety declaration, shares it with the Crown and files it before the hearing, the expectation is that examination in chief and cross-examination of the surety are not required at all. The surety should still attend so the release can be entered into immediately.

A matter requiring an interpreter. This is not a courtesy and it is not optional. Proceedings conducted in a language the accused does not fully follow are not fair proceedings, and interpretation takes roughly twice as long as it sounds like it should. Ask for an interpreter if there is any doubt. Getting by is not the standard, and a person who understands ninety per cent of a bail hearing has understood none of the ten per cent that mattered.

A section 524 application with two or more existing release orders. Section 524 is the mechanism that brings someone already on release back before the court to have that release cancelled and detention reconsidered. Someone already carrying two release orders who picks up a new allegation is in a genuinely difficult position, and it is exactly the scenario the complex category was written for. How breach allegations are defended is set out on our failure to comply page.

A specialized prosecution team matter. Some prosecutions are run by dedicated Crown teams rather than the general list. Those files tend to carry more material and a more developed position, and they take longer to argue properly.

None of this is automatic. Two features create eligibility, not a designation. Someone has to identify it and ask. The mechanics of the hearing itself are covered on our show cause hearing page.

Ontario Shores, and what a court-ordered assessment involves

Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences is in Whitby, and it is the reason a Whitby page has to deal with forensic mental health properly rather than in passing. Courts across this part of Ontario send people here.

Ontario Shores operates a Forensic Assessment Unit, a secure inpatient unit for people referred through the court system, where an interprofessional team carries out assessments of criminal responsibility and of whether a person is fit to stand trial. The published services include psychiatric assessment to assist the consideration of Ontario courts, psychosocial assessment, psychological assessment and family assessment. It serves adults aged eighteen and over. Patients are referred through the court system or under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Review Board. A separate Forensic Assessment and Rehabilitation Unit serves patients on Review Board disposition orders and others referred by the courts.

Some plain reassurance, because a court order of this kind frightens people badly. An assessment is not a punishment. It is not a finding that you are dangerous, and it is not a finding of guilt. It is the court obtaining expert evidence on a specific legal question it cannot answer on its own.

What it does involve is real. Clinical interviews, review of records, collateral information, and a report that goes back to the court. The assessing clinician is not your treating doctor and is not bound to you in the way a treating relationship would be. The report is evidence in a proceeding. That is not a reason to be uncooperative, but it is a reason to get advice before the process starts rather than after the report lands.

Where mental health is genuinely part of a case, it can be relevant at several points: to fitness, to criminal responsibility, to bail conditions and supports, and to sentencing. Those are separate questions with separate tests, and conflating them is the most common error made by people trying to work this out alone. Our mental health and criminal defence page goes through them.

Fit to stand trial, and not criminally responsible: two different findings

These two get confused constantly, including by people in the middle of them, so here is the distinction stated as plainly as it can be.

Fitness to stand trial is about now. Can you understand what is happening in the proceedings, understand the possible consequences, and communicate with your lawyer well enough to participate in your own defence? It is a present-tense question about your capacity to be tried. It has nothing to do with what happened on the date of the alleged offence, and nothing to do with whether you are unwell in a general sense. Plenty of people with serious mental illness are perfectly fit to stand trial.

Criminal responsibility is about then. It asks whether, at the time of the alleged act, a mental disorder rendered you incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act or of knowing that it was wrong. A finding of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder is not an acquittal and it is not a conviction. It is a third verdict with its own consequences.

Both questions can be assessed by the forensic units at Ontario Shores on a court referral, and they are assessed separately, because they are genuinely separate.

Now the part that most needs saying. A finding of unfitness or of not criminally responsible is not the soft option. It is not a way out. It brings the Ontario Review Board into your life, and the Board’s jurisdiction continues for as long as the Board considers necessary, which can be considerably longer than the sentence attached to the underlying charge would have been. In some cases that route is plainly right. In others it is plainly wrong. Which one it is depends on the charge, the evidence, the diagnosis and the realistic alternatives, and nobody can tell you which without reading the disclosure first.

So: do not push for a mental health route because it sounds gentler, and do not resist one because it sounds frightening. Get advice on your actual file.

The Ontario Review Board, and what follows an NCR verdict

The Ontario Review Board reviews and determines dispositions for people found unfit to stand trial and for people found not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder. It can refer an individual to a facility such as Ontario Shores with an order for assessment or treatment.

It is a tribunal rather than a court, and it operates on a different rhythm from a criminal proceeding. A criminal case ends. A Review Board file is reviewed periodically for as long as the Board retains jurisdiction, which is why the phrase people should focus on is not what happens next but for how long.

We are not going to tell you what disposition a particular case attracts, how long Board jurisdiction typically lasts, or what conditions are usual. Those outcomes turn entirely on the individual, the index offence, the clinical evidence and the Board’s assessment of risk, and any page that offers you a general answer is inventing one. What we can tell you is the structural point: the Board’s involvement is open-ended in a way a fixed sentence is not, and that asymmetry is the thing to weigh.

One more caution specific to this region, because the temptation to assume otherwise is strong. Some Ontario courthouses operate specialised or therapeutic court streams. We are not asserting that the Oshawa courthouse runs a mental health court, a drug treatment court or a community support court, because we have not confirmed that it does. If a therapeutic route is relevant to your situation, the right approach is for counsel to ask the Crown’s office directly what is actually available in Durham rather than to rely on what exists somewhere else in the province.

Gladue principles, by contrast, apply in every court in Canada for Indigenous accused, at bail and at sentencing, whether or not a dedicated sitting exists locally.

Highway 412 runs the length of Whitby, and the OPP patrol it

Highway 412 lies entirely within Whitby. It connects Highway 401 to Highway 407, and it is the only highway in Durham Region that sits end to end inside one municipality. The Province removed the tolls from the 412 and from the 418 further east, which changed traffic volumes on both.

Here is why that geography matters to a criminal file. Provincial highways in Ontario are patrolled by the Ontario Provincial Police, not by the regional service. So a charge laid on the 412, despite the whole road being inside Whitby, is very likely an OPP matter rather than a Durham Regional Police one. The same applies to the stretch of the 401 and the 407 crossing the town.

The charge is still heard at the Ontario Court of Justice in Oshawa. What changes is who holds everything behind it. A different service keeps the officer’s notes. A different disclosure route produces the in-car video, the speed measurement records, the calibration and maintenance logs for the device used, and the officer’s training and qualification records. Requests sent to Durham Regional Police for an OPP file do not get redirected. They simply do not produce anything.

In driving cases the technical record frequently is the case. Whether the demand was made forthwith. Whether the observation period before a breath sample was adequate and properly documented. Whether the screening device was approved and maintained. Who calibrated it, when, and whether the record exists. These are documentary questions, and documents have retention schedules.

Check the service named on your paperwork before assuming anything, and get a preservation request out early. The most common irreversible loss in a driving file is video that nobody asked for in time.

Where our offices are, and why we will not claim a Whitby address

We do not have an office in Whitby. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and you should look carefully at any firm whose Whitby page implies a local address.

The honest position is that a Whitby address would do nothing for you, because there is no criminal court in Whitby to be near. The work on a Whitby file happens at 150 Bond Street East in Oshawa, in the Crown’s office in that building, in correspondence with Central West Division, and, where an assessment is ordered, in reports coming back from a hospital that has no interest in where your lawyer parks.

What we do is read the disclosure in full and early. Identify whether the investigating service is Durham Regional Police or the OPP, which on the 412 is a live question. Get preservation requests out while video still exists. Work out whether a bail hearing has two or more of the complex features and say so before the hearing rather than after it. Prepare the surety declaration so your surety is not cross-examined. And where mental health is genuinely in play, get proper advice on fitness, responsibility and the Review Board before anyone commits to a route, because that decision is much harder to reverse than people assume.

Our case results page gives a sense of the work. No past result predicts another one, and a lawyer who promises you an outcome on a first call is promising something they cannot know.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal defence and family law firm led by Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner. We act for people across the Greater Toronto Area and the surrounding regions, Durham included, and we appear at the courthouse that hears the charge.

Our four offices are:

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

None is in Whitby, and for a matter heard in Oshawa that costs you nothing. Disclosure arrives electronically. Case management is frequently virtual. Crown pre-trials happen by phone. The parts that require a person in a room are the parts where what matters is who that person is and how thoroughly they have prepared.

We take Criminal Code and federal drug matters, bail hearings and bail reviews, breach allegations, driving offences, fraud, theft, weapons, assault, sexual offences, youth matters and cases where mental health is central. First consultations are free.

What Whitby clients ask before the first appearance

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Durham Region and is not legal advice. Court locations, published schedules, hospital programmes and contact routes were current when this page was written and can change, so confirm them at source 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 Whitby, get advice about your own facts and your own disclosure.