Ottawa Criminal Defence Lawyers

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Charged in Ottawa? Criminal matters are heard at 161 Elgin Street, where the Ontario Court of Justice and the Superior Court of Justice share one building. Kazandji Law is a Toronto firm with no Ottawa office. We travel to appear and use remote attendance where the Court permits it. This page follows the paperwork, document by document, from the sheet an officer handed you to the record left behind at the end.

Reviewed by Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Updated September 2026.

The paper they handed you, and why the three kinds are not the same

Almost every Ottawa criminal case begins with a piece of paper pressed into someone’s hand at the roadside, at a police station counter, or through the bars of a cell. People remember the officer. They rarely remember which document they were given. That is the first thing we ask about, because the answer changes what happens next and how much room there is to move.

An appearance notice is the lightest of the three. An officer who does not arrest you, or who arrests and then releases you without conditions, can issue one. It tells you where to be and when. It does not, by itself, restrict how you live. If you were handed a single sheet with a date and an address and nothing that reads like a rule, this is probably what you have.

An undertaking goes further. It is a promise you signed, and the promise has terms in it. Do not contact a named person. Do not attend a named address. Surrender your passport. Report to a station. The terms sit on the page in numbered paragraphs, and each one is independently enforceable. Breaching a single paragraph is a fresh criminal offence, quite separate from whatever you were originally accused of.

A release order is what a justice makes after a bail hearing, and it is the heaviest of the three. It can require a surety, a deposit, a curfew, house arrest, or a combination. It can be varied only by going back to court. The conditions in it are often the part of a case that does the most damage to a person’s ordinary life, long before anyone reaches a verdict.

Bring all of it to a first conversation. Not a description of it, the actual paper, front and back, including anything stapled behind. The back page frequently carries the conditions, and the conditions are where the immediate risk lives. If the document has been lost, say so early, because it can be obtained again, and in the meantime nobody should be guessing at what they are bound by.

What 161 Elgin Street actually is, and what it is not

The Ottawa Courthouse sits at 161 Elgin Street, second floor, Ottawa K2P 2K1. That address is worth committing to memory for a reason most people do not expect: in Ottawa, the Ontario Court of Justice and the Superior Court of Justice both publish it. One building holds both criminal courts.

This makes Ottawa simpler than several other Ontario cities, where a person can spend an anxious morning at the wrong address. It also creates its own confusion. Being in the right building does not mean being in the right court. The overwhelming majority of Criminal Code charges begin and end in the Ontario Court of Justice. A smaller set moves to the Superior Court, either because the accused elects to go there or because the offence charged requires it. Those two courts run on different rules, different scheduling desks and different expectations, and the fact that they share a lobby does not soften any of that.

The Superior Court’s Ottawa criminal scheduling office is the single point of contact for trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and reviews, ninety day detention review hearings, criminal applications and motions, assignment court, trial scheduling court and summary conviction appeals. One desk, a long list of functions. Knowing which desk holds your matter is the difference between a question answered in a day and a week spent on hold.

Serving Ottawa from a Toronto office: what travels, what goes by video, and what does not

Kazandji Law is a Toronto firm. Our offices are in Toronto, Thornhill, North York and Oakville. We do not have an office in Ottawa, we are not going to imply that we do, and you should treat any firm page that blurs this point as telling you something about how it handles the rest of its information.

What we do instead is straightforward. We travel to 161 Elgin Street to appear when the stage of the case calls for a lawyer physically in the room, and we use the remote attendance the Ontario Court of Justice actually permits for the stages where it is permitted. Those are two different things and the line between them is set by statute and by the Court, not by us.

The statutory starting point is section 715.21 of the Criminal Code: a person who appears at, participates in or presides at a proceeding does so in person unless the Act provides otherwise. Remote attendance is the exception. Section 715.23 sets the test for allowing an accused to appear by audioconference or videoconference, weighing their location and circumstances, the cost of attending in person, the suitability of the place they would appear from, the right to a fair and public hearing, and the seriousness of the offence. A separate provision, section 715.25, is the one that governs counsel, because a lawyer falls inside the definition of a participant rather than an accused. Plenty of firm pages run those two sections together. They are not interchangeable, and a court applying one is not applying the other.

Layered on top is the Ontario Court of Justice practice direction titled Mode of Appearance for Ontario Court of Justice Criminal Proceedings, issued by Chief Justice Nicklas under rules 1.4 and 5 of the Criminal Rules. It replaced the earlier mode of appearance guidelines. Its shape matters more than its title. Case management appearances and judicial pre-trials are genuinely remote friendly. Guilty pleas, sentencings, trials and preliminary inquiries are in person unless a judge orders otherwise, and that order has to be applied for. Section B(1) goes further still: because private consultation across mixed modes is awkward, counsel are expected to attend in person, other than at case management appearances, whenever the accused is appearing in person.

If your matter needs a lawyer in Ottawa repeatedly and at short notice, and we cannot commit to that, you will hear it on the first call rather than after you have retained us.

The document you will never be handed: Crown disclosure and who has to ask

Nobody gives you the Crown’s file at the roadside. Disclosure is the body of material the prosecution holds and is obliged to provide: officers’ notes, the synopsis, witness statements, cruiser and body worn video, breath technician records, photographs, phone downloads, communications logs, and whatever else was gathered. It is the single most important set of documents in the case and it is the one document set you are not handed automatically at the start.

It arrives because someone asks for it, and then keeps asking. First packages are often partial. Video takes longer than paper. Specialised material, forensic analysis and third party records follow their own timelines and sometimes their own applications. A defence that is built on a first disclosure package alone is a defence built on a summary written by the person who arrested you.

This is where the early stages of an Ottawa case actually get used. Case management appearances look, to a person sitting at the back, like nothing happening: a date named, a matter put over, everyone gone in four minutes. What they are is the mechanism by which disclosure is chased, gaps are identified on the record, and the Crown is held to a timetable. The appearances are cheap. The work between them is not.

Reviewing disclosure properly is slow and it is where cases are won and lost. An officer’s notes and the same officer’s sworn statement can sit at slightly different angles to each other. A time stamp on a video can fail to match a time written in a notebook. A continuity gap can appear in how an exhibit was handled. None of that is visible in a synopsis. All of it is visible in the underlying material, and only if someone reads all of it.

The Zoom coordinates on your release document: Courtroom 14 and the tier you belong in

Somewhere on the paper you were given, or in the covering material that came with it, there is likely a courtroom, a date and a set of connection details. In Ottawa the criminal case management court is Courtroom 14, and the Ontario Court of Justice publishes both its schedule and the Zoom coordinates for it on its own Ottawa location page.

Courtroom 14 is not one undifferentiated list. It runs on published tiers, the same tiers on every sitting day, and turning up at the wrong hour is a good way to spend a morning watching other people’s matters. The Court sets it out like this.

Time	Tier
8:30 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.	Counsel matters
10:45 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.	Morning break
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.	Duty counsel matters
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.	Lunch
1:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.	Video remands, in custody accused
2:00 p.m.	Duty counsel matters continued, and self represented accused

There is a second layer worth knowing. The Court publishes Courtroom 14 as youth court for all matters on Mondays, and as adult criminal case management from Tuesday to Friday. Federal matters case management sits separately, in Courtroom 8 on Tuesdays. So the room is not the whole answer. The day carries information too.

If you are represented, the counsel tier is where your matter belongs and your lawyer handles the appearance. If you are not yet represented, the later tiers are where duty counsel and self represented accused are dealt with, and duty counsel can give you summary advice on the day without taking the file on. Duty counsel is a genuine resource and it is not the same thing as having a lawyer.

Two cautions. Published schedules change, so confirm against the Court’s own page and against your own document rather than against a law firm page, including this one. And a judicial officer can direct something different in an individual case, in which case the direction governs and the published tier does not.

The designation of counsel: the filing that can keep you out of routine remands

People assume a criminal charge means months of standing in a courtroom while a date is named and the matter is put over. For a represented accused that is frequently avoidable, and the mechanism is a document.

The Ontario Court of Justice publishes a practice direction on Enhanced Designations of Counsel. Where a represented accused has filed one, matters can be adjourned without the accused personally appearing. Routine attendance becomes counsel’s job. For anyone holding down shift work, caring for a child, or living some distance from the courthouse, that is not a technicality. It is the difference between a case that quietly proceeds and a case that costs you your employment before it is resolved.

A related direction covers waiver of personal attendance for accused persons in custody. Defence counsel can file a waiver so that an in custody client’s matter is adjourned in their absence rather than requiring them to be produced for a two minute remand.

Both have limits and both have to be set up correctly. A designation does not cover every stage of a proceeding. It does not survive a judicial direction requiring your attendance. It does not apply where the Court requires you personally, and it is not a substitute for turning up at a plea, a trial or a sentencing. It is a tool for the routine parts, and the routine parts are most of the calendar.

One Ottawa specific point, and it is the kind of detail that matters when you are trying to get something filed. Several Ontario Court of Justice locations publish a dedicated filing address for enhanced designations on their own location page. Ottawa does not. That does not mean the practice direction is unavailable in Ottawa. It means the filing route is arranged through counsel and the courthouse rather than sent to a published address, and anyone telling you to email it somewhere specific in Ottawa should be asked where they got that address.

The section 530 application: a language right with a deadline attached

Ottawa is the most genuinely bilingual criminal court in Ontario, and the right that sits behind that is statutory rather than a matter of local courtesy.

Section 530 of the Criminal Code entitles an accused whose language is English or French to apply for an order that they be tried by a judge or justice who speaks that language, and in some circumstances by a court able to proceed in both. Section 530.1 then sets out what the order actually delivers: you and your counsel may use either official language throughout the proceeding, witnesses may testify in either, you are entitled to a prosecutor who speaks your language, interpreters are provided, and the record includes a transcript in the language in which the words were spoken. It is a substantive entitlement, not a translation service bolted onto an English trial.

Here is the part that catches people. The application has to be made no later than the appearance at which your trial date is set. Miss that appearance without raising it and you are relying on the court’s discretion rather than on your right. Section 530(3) requires the judicial officer before whom you first appear to ensure you are advised of the right and of the time limit, but being told something once, in a busy courtroom, on the worst day of your year, is not the same as understanding it.

If a French language trial is what you want, raise it at the outset, and raise it with whoever is going to conduct the trial. A firm that will conduct your case in English should tell you that plainly and early enough for you to act on it, because the deadline does not pause while you decide.

Kazandji Law conducts its criminal defence work in English. We set out the section 530 right here because it is real, because the deadline is unforgiving, and because an unrepresented person in Ottawa who does not know about it can lose it without ever being asked a second time. If proceeding in French matters to you, that should shape who you retain, and we will say so.

Two prosecution files, two different offices

Readers are often surprised to learn that not every prosecutor at 161 Elgin Street works for the same employer. Which office holds your file changes who you are dealing with, how disclosure reaches you, and often how a resolution discussion goes.

Most Criminal Code prosecutions in Ottawa are run by the provincial Crown Attorney’s office at the courthouse. The Ontario Court of Justice publishes its contact details for Ottawa as VirtualCrownOttawa@ontario.ca and 613-239-1200. That is the office handling assaults, thefts, frauds, most driving offences and the general run of criminal charges.

Federal prosecutions are different. Offences under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and a range of other federal statutes are prosecuted on behalf of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Separate office, separate disclosure route, separate internal policies on resolution. The Ontario Court of Justice underlines the split in its own scheduling by listing a federal matters case management court in Courtroom 8 on Tuesdays, apart from the general adult case management list in Courtroom 14.

The practical consequence is simple. If you are facing a drug offence, and particularly a trafficking allegation, you are not in the same lane as someone charged with a provincially prosecuted offence, and advice drawn from that other lane can be actively misleading. Disclosure timelines differ. The people with authority to resolve the file differ. Expectations about what a reasonable position looks like differ.

It also means that a person facing both a federal charge and a provincial one has two files, two prosecutors and two sets of conversations running in parallel over the same events. Those have to be coordinated deliberately. They do not coordinate themselves, and an outcome agreed in one lane does not bind the other.

Ask early which office is prosecuting you. It is not a difficult question and the answer reshapes the sensible strategy.

The surety declaration and the conditions your family underwrites

When someone is arrested in Ottawa they are brought before a justice at 161 Elgin Street, and under the Court’s mode of appearance practice direction an accused appears by video for a first appearance after arrest and for a contested bail hearing unless the Court directs otherwise. The Superior Court handles bail reviews and ninety day detention reviews at the same address through its criminal scheduling office.

What that summary leaves out is the paperwork a family signs. A surety is a person who takes responsibility for supervising an accused in the community and who pledges an amount of money against that responsibility. The pledge is documented. The surety is examined about their assets, their relationship to the accused, their understanding of the allegations and their plan for supervision, and a justice decides whether the plan is adequate.

The money is frequently misunderstood. In most cases no cash changes hands at the outset. What the surety signs is an undertaking to pay if the accused breaches. That liability is real and it can be enforced. A parent who pledges an amount they do not actually have, in a courtroom, at the end of a frightening day, has created a problem for themselves that nobody explained.

Preparation is what makes a bail hearing go well. Sureties who arrive rehearsed, with documents, with a plan that answers the specific concern the Crown is raising, succeed where willing but unprepared relatives do not. The formal name for the proceeding is a show cause hearing, and the phrase is accurate: someone has to show cause.

Once a release order exists, every condition in it is a separate obligation. Breaching one is a fresh charge under the failure to comply provisions, prosecuted on its own footing, and it frequently does more damage to a case than the original allegation. Clients are sometimes acquitted of the substantive charge and convicted of breaching the conditions imposed while awaiting trial on it. If a condition has become impossible to live with, the answer is to apply to vary it, not to quietly ignore it.

Trial readiness in Ottawa: a Monday list, tiered by your trial day

Ottawa runs a trial readiness court, and it runs it on a system that is published and unusually easy to read once somebody explains it.

The appearance happens on the Monday of the week before. The list is then tiered according to the day your trial or preliminary inquiry is actually set for, so that everyone whose trial is on a Wednesday is dealt with together. The Court publishes it as follows.

Time on the Monday	Which matters are called
9:00 a.m.	All cases with self represented accused
10:00 a.m.	Trials and preliminary inquiries set for Monday
10:30 a.m.	Set for Tuesday
11:00 a.m.	Set for Wednesday
11:30 a.m.	Set for Thursday
12:00 noon	Set for Friday

Confirming readiness is not an administrative shrug. It is a representation to the court that the matter will proceed, that disclosure is complete or that any outstanding issue has been identified, that witnesses are arranged, that the estimate of time is honest, and that no application has been left unfiled. Courts allocate scarce trial time on the strength of that representation, and a case that collapses on the morning has consumed time another accused person was waiting for.

It is also the last sensible checkpoint for a candid conversation about whether trial is the right route. Resolution discussions do not stop because a trial date exists. A realistic assessment at the confirmation stage, measured against what disclosure actually shows rather than what everyone hoped it would show, is worth more than optimism carried through to the courtroom door.

Ottawa also publishes plea courts for in custody and out of custody pleas in Courtroom 5, sitting Tuesdays and Fridays, and lists no judge led intensive case management court. Both are small structural facts, and both tell you something about how the building organises its week.

The transcript: the record that outlives the hearing

Every word spoken on the record in an Ottawa courtroom is recorded and can be transcribed. Most people never think about this until it matters, and by then it has already happened.

The practical implication lands hardest at the earliest appearances, which is precisely where people are least prepared. A person standing alone in case management court, anxious to be helpful, explains what happened. Nobody asked them to. The explanation is now on the record. It can be transcribed. It can be put to them later. An account given informally at a first appearance has a way of reappearing at a point in the proceeding when its author would very much prefer it had not.

The rule is easy to state and hard to follow when you are frightened: in a courtroom you answer what is asked and you volunteer nothing. Explanations belong to your lawyer, in private, where they are protected. Duty counsel will tell you the same thing in the corridor if you ask.

Transcripts also do constructive work. They are the raw material of an appeal, because an appeal court reviews what happened rather than anyone’s recollection of it. They matter on a bail review and wherever the exact wording of a condition or ruling is later in dispute. Ordering them takes time and costs money, and both are worth planning for.

There is one more reason the record deserves respect. The Ontario Court of Justice has published a remote appearance code of conduct and an interim observer policy, brought in after Ontario proceedings were disrupted by people joining virtual courtrooms to cause trouble. A virtual appearance is a court appearance. It carries the same obligations, produces the same record, and a court may end a remote appearance at any time and take whatever measure it considers appropriate. Section 715.222 of the Criminal Code says so in terms.

What the file leaves behind: discharge, conviction, withdrawal

Cases end, and what they leave behind is not the same in every instance. This is the last document in the sequence and the one that follows a person longest.

A withdrawal or a stay means the charge is not proceeding. That is the cleanest ending available, although police and court records of the arrest and the charge can persist, and how they surface depends on the kind of check being run.

An acquittal after trial is a finding of not guilty. A discharge, absolute or conditional, involves a finding of guilt without a conviction being registered, and the two kinds do not sit on a record for the same period. A conviction is a conviction, and it stays until something is done about it.

A peace bond is a different creature again. It is not a finding of guilt, it is a recognizance to keep the peace and be of good behaviour, and it is sometimes a sensible landing place in a case that would otherwise be fought at length over disputed facts. It carries its own conditions and breaching it is an offence.

Where a conviction is already registered, a record suspension is the route to setting it aside for most purposes, with its own eligibility periods and its own application process. It is worth understanding before you accept an outcome, not afterwards.

The reason to think about all of this at the start rather than the end is that the consequences of an ending are rarely confined to the courtroom. Employment screening, professional licensing, volunteer work with children or vulnerable adults, insurance, travel across the border, and immigration status for anyone who is not a citizen can all turn on which of these words appears on the file. A resolution that looks attractive on the day because it ends the stress can be the wrong resolution when it is measured against the next twenty years. Ask what it leaves behind before you agree to it.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal defence firm led by founding partner Fadi Matthew Kazandji. We act for people across Ontario, from four offices, none of which is in Ottawa.

• Toronto. 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310.
• North York.
• Oakville.

A licence from the Law Society of Ontario is provincial. It carries no local restriction and there is no separate admission step for appearing at the Ottawa courthouse, so the only real questions are practical ones about travel and attendance. We answer them directly rather than leaving you to infer an Ottawa presence from a phone number.

Our criminal defence practice covers the range of charges that come through an Ontario courthouse, and the criminal defence hub sets out how we work. Consultations are free, and they are the point at which we tell you whether this firm is the right fit for an Ottawa file or whether you would be better served by someone down the street from 161 Elgin.

Ottawa criminal defence: twelve questions answered

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Ottawa and Ontario. It is not legal advice, it does not create a solicitor and client relationship, and it should not be relied on in place of advice about your own case. Court schedules, courtroom assignments, practice directions and contact details change without notice. Always confirm details against the documents you were given and the Ontario Court of Justice website, and speak to a lawyer about your situation.