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A criminal case is really a sequence of dates. Some of them matter enormously and some of them are over in ninety seconds, and almost nobody tells you which is which in advance. Woodbridge is part of the City of Vaughan, Vaughan sits in York Region, and York Region criminal matters are heard at the Newmarket Courthouse. Newmarket runs an unusually rich schedule, including something most neighbouring courthouses simply do not have: a real trial confirmation court. This page works through your calendar, one type of date at a time.

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

Woodbridge is part of Vaughan, and Vaughan’s criminal court is in Newmarket

Woodbridge is a community within the City of Vaughan. Vaughan is in York Region. The Ontario Court of Justice location for York Region is the Newmarket Courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West, Newmarket, Ontario L3Y 6B1, reachable on 905-853-4811. There is no criminal court in Woodbridge, none anywhere in Vaughan, and your matter will not be heard closer to home than the north end of York Region.

That is a longer trip than most people expect, and it shapes everything about how a Woodbridge file should be run. It is also why understanding the schedule matters more here than almost anywhere else. Turning up at the wrong hour in Newmarket is not a minor inconvenience.

Policing is York Regional Police. Number 4 District covers Vaughan and King Township from a station at 2700 Rutherford Road, Vaughan, open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on a non-emergency line of 1-866-876-5423. There are two community substations: the Kleinburg Community Substation at 10418 Islington Avenue, Woodbridge, open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and one at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, 100 New Park Place, Vaughan, open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. York Regional Police headquarters is at 47 Don Hillock Drive, Aurora.

The provincial Crown Attorney’s office for York sits at the Newmarket courthouse on 905-853-4800, and the Newmarket duty counsel office is reachable on 905-836-8580. Federal prosecutions in York Region run through a single standing agent for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which is worth noticing only because some neighbouring regions split that work between two.

We also have pages for Vaughan, for Newmarket and for Markham, all of which feed into the same courthouse. The wider criminal defence practice sits behind all of them.

Your first date: what actually happens, and what does not

Start by managing your expectations downward, because the gap between what people brace themselves for and what actually occurs is enormous.

At a first appearance, nobody decides anything about guilt. No evidence is called. No witnesses attend. You do not tell your side of the story, and trying to is actively harmful. In most cases the appearance lasts under two minutes and produces an adjournment so that disclosure can be obtained and reviewed.

What the date is genuinely for is administrative: confirming you are before the court, confirming counsel is retained or that you need time to retain, starting the disclosure process, and fixing the next date. People routinely take a day off work, sit through a morning of nerves, and leave feeling that nothing happened. Nothing was supposed to happen.

The corresponding warning is that these dates are not optional. Failing to attend can produce a bench warrant and a separate charge of failure to attend, and neither goes away on its own. A warrant sits in the system until it surfaces, usually at the worst possible time, at a traffic stop or a border crossing.

One genuine decision does often arise early: whether to have counsel. Duty counsel at Newmarket can help on the day, explain what is happening and speak to a set date, and they are free. What they cannot do is carry your file, because they do not have your disclosure and will not be there next time. They are a safety net, not a defence, and the distinction matters most in any conversation that could end with you entering a plea.

Below is the shape of the calendar ahead of you. Court schedules change, so treat this as the Court’s current published pattern rather than a promise, and confirm your own time on your own notice.

Type of date	When the Court currently publishes it	Who it is for
Case management, courtroom 201	9:00 a.m.	Counsel matters
Case management, courtroom 201	10:45 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 2:00 p.m. and 3:15 p.m.	Self represented accused, and continuing counsel matters
Judge-led case management court	Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m.	Counsel matters
Judge-led case management court	Monday to Friday, 2:15 p.m.	Self represented matters
Plea court for out of custody accused	Published separately with its own connection details	Matters that are resolving
Trial confirmation	The Monday one week and two weeks before trial, tiered by the trial or preliminary inquiry date. The Court publishes 9 a.m. for one sitting and 10:30 a.m. for the other	Matters that already have a trial date

Courtroom 201 at 9 a.m. is the counsel call. Everything else waits.

This is the most concrete, checkable argument for retaining counsel early that exists anywhere in York Region, and it is published by the Court itself.

Newmarket runs courtroom 201 on a tiered schedule. The 9:00 a.m. call is for counsel matters. Self represented accused, along with continuing counsel matters, are called at 10:45 a.m., then again at 12:00 p.m., 2:00 p.m. and 3:15 p.m., with recesses in between and a lunch break at 1:00.

Read what that means practically. A represented person can be called at nine, dealt with in a couple of minutes, and be at work by ten. An unrepresented person on the same file, on the same morning, may wait until the late morning call, or the afternoon, and may be adjourned to do it again in a month. That is not a penalty for self representation. It is a scheduling consequence, and it repeats at every appearance for the life of the file.

The Court also publishes a Notice to Counsel with two separate virtual counsel sign-up sheets, one for courtroom 201 and one for courtroom 106, developed by the Criminal Lawyers Association together with the Crown’s office. Represented matters are called from those sheets rather than from a general list. We are describing the arrangement rather than linking the sheets, and we do not publish meeting identifiers or passcodes. Get those from the Court.

Case management appearances can generally be attended by video unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. For someone in Woodbridge facing a trip to the north end of York Region, that matters. Guilty pleas are a different matter and are generally in person.

The judge-led case management court that sits every weekday

A judge-led case management court is one where a judge takes an active role in moving a file forward rather than simply granting the next adjournment. Stalled disclosure, a Crown position that has not moved, an unrealistic trial estimate: these are the things it exists to unstick.

Newmarket sits one every weekday. Monday to Friday, at 9:00 a.m. for counsel matters and 2:15 p.m. for self represented people, with published connection details. Anyone who practises across this part of Ontario will tell you how unusual that frequency is. Comparable courts elsewhere in the region sit weekly, or twice a month, or not at all.

The practical consequence for a Woodbridge file is that there are far more opportunities to get a judge’s attention on a problem, and far fewer excuses for letting a file sit. If disclosure has been outstanding for three months, that is fixable here in a way it is not everywhere.

It is not automatic, though. Somebody has to ask, and there has to be a reason worth a judge’s time. Turning up to complain in general terms achieves nothing. Turning up with a specific outstanding item, a record of the requests already made and the dates they were made on, is what produces an order.

Which is really a point about record keeping. Keep every letter, every email and every date. The value of a case management court is entirely determined by the quality of the record you can put in front of it.

The Crown pre-trial, and what you should already have in hand

The Crown pre-trial is a conversation between defence and the assistant Crown attorney about the evidence, the real issues in the case, the realistic length of a trial and whether the matter can resolve without one. Together with the judicial pre-trial, it decides the overwhelming majority of criminal cases in Ontario.

What you must have first is disclosure, and you must have read it. All of it. The Crown’s obligation to disclose is continuing, which means material keeps arriving, and the packages that arrive late are frequently the interesting ones. A pre-trial conducted before disclosure has been reviewed properly is a conversation between one person who knows the file and one person who does not.

What actually shifts a Crown position, in rough order of effectiveness: a specific evidentiary problem identified with reference to the page it appears on. A Charter issue with a real foundation in the disclosure rather than a hopeful assertion. Material about the accused that the Crown does not have, such as counselling already under way, employment that would be lost, or immigration consequences the Crown may not have considered. And a realistic proposal, because Crowns move toward defence counsel who are credible about the weak parts of their own case.

What does not shift a position: an insistence that the complainant is lying, offered without anything to support it. General assertions of unfairness. And the argument that a conviction would be inconvenient, which is true of every conviction ever entered.

If status in Canada is in play, raise it early rather than late. Immigration consequences turn on the offence and the sentence in ways that are not obvious, and they can be far more serious than the sentence itself. That has to be built into the resolution discussion from the start, not discovered afterwards.

The judicial pre-trial, and what a judge says off the record

A judicial pre-trial brings a judge into the discussion. It is not a hearing, nothing is decided, and what is said there is off the record and cannot be used against either side later. That candour is the entire point of it.

A judge will tell both sides things neither will hear anywhere else. That a Charter application has more in it than the Crown is treating it as having. That a defence theory does not survive contact with the disclosure. That a three-day trial estimate is really five. That a Crown position on sentence is out of line with what this judge, or any judge in this building, would be likely to impose after a trial.

That last one does a great deal of work. A defendant weighing an early resolution against a trial is making a decision under uncertainty, and a judge’s indication removes a meaningful chunk of that uncertainty. Not all of it. Judicial pre-trial indications are not binding on the trial judge and are not a guarantee. But they turn a guess into an informed decision.

It is also where trial scheduling gets real. How long does the matter actually need. How many witnesses. Are there applications requiring separate time. Is an interpreter needed. Those answers determine when a date can be found, and an estimate given carelessly at this stage is the single most common reason trials collapse and have to be re-run months later.

Newmarket’s every-weekday judge-led case management court means getting in front of a judge is easier here than in most places. Use it.

Plea court for out of custody accused, if the file is going to resolve

Newmarket publishes separate connection information for a plea court for out of custody accused. That is a dedicated stream for matters that are resolving, and it is not something every courthouse runs.

Before anyone goes near it, three things need to be settled, and they are settled in this order. What exactly are you pleading to, including which count and on what agreed facts. What is the Crown going to say on sentence, and is it a joint submission or are the parties apart. And what are the consequences beyond the sentence.

That third question is the one people skip, and it is frequently the one that matters most five years later. A criminal record affects employment screening and volunteer vetting. It affects travel, and the United States makes its own admissibility decisions regardless of what an Ontario court thought was proportionate. It can affect professional licensing. For anyone who is not a citizen, it can affect status in Canada in ways that dwarf the sentence imposed. A conditional discharge and a suspended sentence can look similar on the day and have completely different downstream effects.

A guilty plea also has formal requirements. It must be voluntary, unequivocal and informed, meaning you understand the nature of the allegation, the effect of the plea and the consequences. A plea entered to end an unbearable process is exactly the plea that gets challenged later, and challenging it is much harder than not entering it.

Guilty pleas are generally in person unless narrow consent conditions apply. If the matter is resolving, that is one trip to Newmarket worth making properly. And if a conviction has already been entered and the question is what comes next, see appeals.

Trial confirmation: Newmarket runs one, and neighbouring courts do not

Here is the date that makes Newmarket genuinely different from the courthouses around it, and no competing Woodbridge page mentions it.

What trial confirmation does is force the question early. Is this matter actually going ahead. Is disclosure complete. Are the witnesses available and have they been served. Is the time estimate still right. Are there applications nobody has filed yet. Has anything changed that makes a resolution possible after all.

The benefit is real and it runs in both directions. A file that is not ready gets exposed a week or two out, when there is still time to fix it, rather than collapsing on the morning of trial in front of witnesses who took the day off. A file that is ready gets confirmed, and everyone can prepare knowing it is genuinely running.

The flip side is that it is a test, and tests can be failed. Arriving at trial confirmation without disclosure reviewed, without witness availability confirmed and without a realistic estimate is a bad afternoon with consequences. It is also where a defence that has quietly done nothing for eight months becomes visible.

Used properly, it is an advantage. It is one of the better reasons to be prosecuted in York Region rather than somewhere without it.

If you breach: the section 524 hearing nobody puts in your calendar

Every date so far has been scheduled. This one is not. It arrives without notice, cancels everything else, and is the most disruptive thing that can happen to a file that was otherwise progressing normally.

Section 524 of the Criminal Code allows the Crown to bring someone already on release back before the court to have that release cancelled and detention reconsidered. It is triggered by an alleged breach of a condition, or by a fresh allegation while you are out. You are arrested, held, and the original charges are reopened alongside whatever is new.

Bail across Ontario has run under a new Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings since 1 June 2026, issued by Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas under Rule 5.1 of the Criminal Rules of the Ontario Court of Justice. It directs that hearings be accommodated on the same day the parties are ready, with time expectations of no longer than thirty minutes for a routine contested hearing and fifteen minutes for a consent release. Weekend and statutory holiday matters are heard in a WASH court sitting, and the Court does not publish which building hosts weekend bail for York Region.

The Practice Direction also matters specifically to a section 524 situation. A section 524 application where there are two or more existing release orders is one of four listed features that can make a matter a Complex Bail Matter. Two or more of those features are needed for the designation. Where it applies, the hearing gets additional court time, ordinarily not exceeding two hours, and is heard the same day it is identified as complex.

Breaches are often more technical than people imagine. Indirect contact through a mutual friend counts. A curfew missed by twenty minutes because a bus was late counts. Being briefly at an address you were told to avoid counts, even for a good reason. The Crown still has to prove the condition existed, that you knew of it, and that you breached without lawful excuse, and ambiguous drafting in an order made quickly in a busy bail court is a real issue. See our failure to comply page, and our Ontario bail page for how the hearing runs.

If a condition has become unworkable, apply to vary it. Breaching and explaining afterwards is not a plan.

Your ticket does not go to Eagle Street. It goes to Yonge Street.

A Vaughan traffic ticket is not heard at the criminal courthouse. York Region runs its court and tribunal services for provincial offences from the Newmarket Court at 17150 Yonge Street, Newmarket, Ontario L3Y 8V3, open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on 905-898-0425 or 1-877-331-3309.

Two courts, two streets, two entirely separate systems. Check the address printed on your document before you travel anywhere, because turning up at 50 Eagle Street West with a speeding ticket wastes a morning, and turning up at 17150 Yonge Street with a criminal charge wastes rather more than that.

The substantive difference is the one that matters. A provincial offence under the Highway Traffic Act or a municipal by-law is not a crime and does not produce a criminal record. A Criminal Code conviction does, with all the employment, travel, licensing and immigration consequences that follow.

The two systems meet at an awkward border in driving cases. Careless driving is a Highway Traffic Act charge. Dangerous driving is a Criminal Code charge. The conduct can look similar at the roadside and the officer’s characterisation determines which system you land in, which is why a charge that sounds minor is worth checking rather than assuming. Our careless driving page sets out where that line falls.

Do not assume a ticket is harmless either. Demerit points, insurance consequences and a suspension can follow, and a suspension leads to driving under suspension charges, which escalate quickly. Read what you were handed.

Charged on the 400, the 407 or the 427 through Vaughan?

Then the officer was probably not a York Regional Police officer. Highway 400, Highway 407 and Highway 427 all run through Vaughan, and provincial highways in Ontario are patrolled by the Ontario Provincial Police rather than by the regional service.

Your charge is still heard at the Ontario Court of Justice in Newmarket. What changes is the organisation behind it. A different service holds the officer’s notes, the in-car video, the speed measurement records, the calibration and maintenance logs for whatever device was used, and the officer’s training and qualification records. A disclosure request sent to York Regional Police for an OPP file does not get forwarded to the right place. It produces nothing.

Driving cases are frequently won and lost in that paperwork. Whether the demand was made forthwith. Whether the observation period before a breath sample was adequate and documented. Whether the screening device was approved and maintained, who calibrated it and when. Whether the stop itself had a lawful basis. These are documentary questions and documents expire.

In-car and body-worn video is overwritten on a fixed retention cycle. Private and commercial camera footage near a highway goes faster still. A preservation request in the first fortnight is worth more than any argument made in month eight about material that no longer exists. Our dangerous driving page goes through what the disclosure should contain.

One more boundary worth knowing. Vaughan borders Toronto to the south. A matter on the Toronto side is a Toronto Police Service investigation heard in the Toronto courts, where adult bail, weekends and statutory holidays included, runs through the Toronto Regional Bail Centre at 2201 Finch Avenue West. York Region bail does not work that way. Do not try to settle which side of a boundary you were on from a map. Raise it with counsel.

Our nearest office is Thornhill. What that does and does not mean.

Our nearest office to Woodbridge is in Thornhill, at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which is in York Region. We also have offices in Toronto, North York and Oakville.

We do not have a Woodbridge office and we are not going to claim one. We are also not going to describe the Thornhill office as being inside Vaughan, because Thornhill straddles a municipal boundary and we are not prepared to state on a public page which side of it we sit on. If that seems like a fussy distinction, it is the same instinct that makes us verify the rest of what appears here.

What actually matters for a Woodbridge file is that the work happens at 50 Eagle Street West in Newmarket, with the York Crown’s office in that building, in correspondence with York Regional Police Number 4 District, and increasingly on video. Being nearer to Woodbridge would not shorten a single one of those steps.

What we do is read the disclosure fully and early. Get on the 9 a.m. counsel call rather than leaving you in the afternoon list. Use the weekday judge-led case management court when a file stalls instead of accepting another adjournment. Arrive at the Crown pre-trial with a position that is supported by the material. Get preservation requests out while video still exists. Treat trial confirmation as the test it is rather than a formality. And tell you early and plainly whether your case should be fought or resolved, because those require different work and pretending otherwise costs you money.

Our case results page gives a sense of the work. No past result predicts another, and a lawyer who guarantees you an outcome on a first call is guaranteeing something nobody can 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, York Region 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, our nearest office to Woodbridge and the one that serves York Region clients.
• North York.
• Oakville.

Disclosure arrives electronically, case management in Newmarket is frequently virtual, and Crown pre-trials happen by phone. The parts of a case that put a person in a room are the parts where what counts is who that person is and how well they prepared.

We take Criminal Code and federal drug matters, bail hearings and bail reviews, breach allegations, driving offences, fraud, theft, weapons, assault, sexual offences and youth matters. First consultations are free, and we will tell you on that call if you do not need us.

Newmarket court dates: what Woodbridge clients ask

This page is general information about criminal procedure in York 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 Woodbridge or elsewhere in Vaughan, get advice about your own facts and your own disclosure.