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Most people charged in Burlington start with one assumption, and it is usually the wrong one. There is a building in this city with the word courthouse on it, so that must be where the case goes. In Halton the answer is more awkward than that, and getting it wrong costs people appearances. This page works through the forks in order: which building, which police service, which prosecutor, which level of court. Each one changes what happens to you next.

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

Yes, there is a Burlington courthouse. No, that is probably not where your charge is heard.

Let us deal with the confusing part first, because almost every Burlington client raises it and almost every competing page glosses over it.

There is a Burlington Courthouse. It sits at 2021 Plains Road East, Burlington, Ontario L7R 4M3, and the Ministry of the Attorney General does list criminal, criminal youth and small claims among the court types at that address, all on 905-637-4125. The Ministry also carries a warning on the same listing: only a limited number of services are available at that location, and you should call for more information on services offered and hours of operation before visiting.

Now the other half. The Ontario Court of Justice publishes its own directory of courthouse locations, and Burlington does not appear in it. The Halton entry in that directory is Milton. Halton Regional Police, for their part, list the Plains Road building as handling criminal court services and small claims for the Region, open Monday to Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

So what is the honest answer? It is this. In practice, the Halton criminal court, the Crown Attorney office serving Halton and the duty counsel office all sit at 491 Steeles Avenue East in Milton, and that is where Burlington criminal charges are dealt with. The Plains Road building exists and is listed for criminal work, but it runs limited services and it is not the court that the Ontario Court of Justice itself holds out as the Halton criminal court.

We are not going to resolve that tension for you with a confident sentence that might be wrong. What we will tell you is the rule that never fails: read your release document. It names the building you have to be in and the date you have to be there. If it is unclear, call the number on it, or call us on 647-588-3234 and we will work it out before you get it wrong.

Three Halton courthouses, and how your paperwork tells you which one

Halton runs three separate court buildings and they do different work. Two of them are in Burlington, which is exactly why people get this wrong. Here is the whole picture in one place.

Building	What it is for	Practical detail
Milton Courthouse 491 Steeles Avenue East, Milton, Ontario L9T 1Y7	The Ontario Court of Justice entry for Halton. Criminal and criminal youth matters for the region. The Superior Court of Justice also sits here.	The Halton Crown Attorney office and the Milton duty counsel office are in this building. Halton Regional Police publish the hours as Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Burlington Courthouse 2021 Plains Road East, Burlington, Ontario L7R 4M3	Listed by the Ministry for criminal, criminal youth and small claims. The Superior Court of Justice lists Burlington as a small claims location only.	The Ministry states a limited number of services are available here and asks you to call 905-637-4125 about services and hours before visiting.
Halton Traffic Courthouse 4085 Palladium Way, Burlington	Provincial offences. Highway Traffic Act tickets, by-laws and similar provincial charges. No Criminal Code work.	Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on 905-637-1274.

Notice what that table does to the usual assumptions. A Burlington resident with a speeding ticket goes to a Burlington building, but not the one with courthouse in the name. A Burlington resident with an assault charge very likely travels to Milton. And the small claims work everybody quotes as proof that the Plains Road building is a real court has nothing to do with criminal procedure at all.

If your matter is closer to the Peel side of the region, our page for Mississauga criminal defence covers a different court entirely, and the same warning about reading the document applies there.

What the Milton courthouse runs for the whole region, and why a Burlington charge ends up there

Halton is one region with one Ontario Court of Justice criminal base, and the Court lists that base as Milton. Burlington, Oakville, Milton and Halton Hills all feed into it. That is not a comment on Burlington. It is how Ontario organises criminal courts, by region rather than by municipality, and it is why plenty of Ontario cities larger than Burlington have no criminal court of their own either.

What sits inside that building matters more than the drive. The Crown Attorney office serving Halton is there, reachable at 905-878-7291 or VirtualCrownMilton@ontario.ca. The Milton duty counsel office is there, on 905-864-8616 or genfaxdcmilton@lao.on.ca. The Court runs separate mailboxes for criminal and family work, which tells you the criminal list is substantial enough to need its own channel. And the Superior Court of Justice sits in the same building, which becomes important the moment your charge is indictable.

For a Burlington accused this has four practical consequences, and they are worth thinking about in week one rather than week ten.

• Your Crown is a Halton Crown. Resolution practice in this region is set regionally, not by the city you were arrested in, and the assigned Crown may have no particular connection to Burlington.
• Your duty counsel, if you use them, is the Milton office. That is a different office from the one you might reach through a general Legal Aid line, and it is the one physically present on your list day.
• Every in person date means travel. That affects your surety, your witnesses and your employer as much as it affects you, and it is a real factor in whether a proposed release plan is workable.
• Custody transport and hold arrangements follow the region. If somebody is held, where they are held is a regional question, not a Burlington one, and it is decided by correctional logistics rather than by geography that makes sense to a family.

There is a positive side to this that rarely gets said. A regional court with a substantial criminal list is a court with a settled Crown office, a functioning duty counsel service, published case management arrangements and a bar that appears there regularly. A city court with limited services would give you a shorter drive and considerably less of everything else.

Which is a good reason to sort out at the very start which of your appearances actually require a body in a room. Quite a few of them do not, and that is covered further down this page.

Halton Regional Police or OPP: who charged you changes where the file lives

Second fork, and it is decided by a line at the top of your paperwork that most people never read.

Halton Regional Police Service polices Burlington streets. Its headquarters is at 2485 North Service Road West in Oakville, main line 905-825-4777, and its Court Services Bureau provides the police presence inside the Halton courthouses on extension 3122. That is the service behind most Burlington charges.

But Burlington is cut through by the QEW, Highway 403 and Highway 407, and provincial highways in Ontario are patrolled by the Ontario Provincial Police rather than by the regional service. So a stop on the QEW in Burlington is usually an OPP investigation while a stop on Brant Street is usually a Halton one, and the two files behave differently from day one.

Here is what actually turns on it. Disclosure sits with the investigating service, so the chase runs through a different unit and a different records system. In car and body worn camera coverage differs between services. Roadside procedure, transport and breath testing are governed by different internal policies. And the officers you may need to cross-examine work out of different buildings with different notebooks and different shift patterns.

None of that decides your case on its own. All of it decides how fast you get the material that does.

Provincial Crown or federal prosecutor? In Halton that is not the same office.

Third fork, and this one surprises people who assume the Crown is one organisation.

Criminal Code charges out of Halton are prosecuted by the provincial Crown Attorney office based at Milton, on 905-878-7291. Most drug charges are federal, prosecuted under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which is an entirely separate prosecution service with its own policies on resolution and its own disclosure practices.

Halton adds a wrinkle. The disclosure contact the Court publishes for federal prosecutions in this region is not a government mailbox at all. Federal work here is handled through a standing agent arrangement, meaning a private firm acting for the federal Crown, with instructions to leave your name and court date. We are not going to publish that firm name or its contact details on a marketing page, but you should know the arrangement exists, because it explains why federal disclosure in Halton sometimes moves on a different rhythm from provincial disclosure.

The practical scenario is common enough. One traffic stop, an assault allegation and a quantity of something in the glove box, and you are now facing two prosecutions run by two different offices that do not share a filing cabinet. Resolving one does not resolve the other, and a deal on one can affect the other in ways nobody explains at the counter. Our Ontario drug offence page sets out how the federal side runs.

Bail after a Burlington arrest, and the least onerous release argument most people never make

Bail for a Burlington arrest is dealt with in the Halton Ontario Court of Justice, whose criminal court and Crown office sit at 491 Steeles Avenue East in Milton. Weekend and statutory holiday bail runs through a WASH court sitting. The Court does not publish which building hosts that sitting for each region, so we will not guess at one here.

What has changed, and changed recently, is the law governing how that hearing runs. Since June 1, 2026 a province wide Practice Direction Regarding Bail Hearings has been in force across the Ontario Court of Justice, issued under Rule 5.1 of the Criminal Rules. Most Burlington clients have never heard of it. It is the most useful thing on this page.

The provision worth memorising is this one. Release with a surety is only required where the court is satisfied that a surety release is the least onerous form of release possible in the circumstances, and that applies regardless of who bears the onus. The Practice Direction goes further: all parties must consider and propose alternatives to a surety release where that is appropriate.

Read that as a burden rather than a preference. It is not enough for the Crown to say a surety would be reassuring. The question is whether anything less onerous would answer the risk the Crown is actually running on, and that question has to be put. An undertaking with conditions. A recognizance without surety. A cash deposit. Residence, curfew or reporting terms tied to a specific address. Non-contact and non-attendance conditions drafted narrowly enough to be workable.

Nobody makes that argument for you. Duty counsel on a busy list has minutes, not hours. If the argument is going to be made properly it needs the release plan assembled before the hearing, which is why the first phone call matters more than any other step in a bail file. Our Ontario bail hearing page goes through the grounds for detention in detail.

The Practice Direction also compressed the hearing itself. All reasonable steps should be taken to run a hearing, consent or contested, on the same day both sides are ready. A routine contested hearing is expected to take no longer than thirty minutes, a consent release no longer than fifteen, both subject to the presiding judicial officer. Preparation is no longer optional, because there is no longer time to improvise.

Do you actually need a surety, or is someone just assuming you do?

Following the fork from the last section, because it deserves its own answer.

A surety is a person who agrees to supervise you in the community and pledges money they may have to pay if you breach. It is a serious thing to ask of somebody, and it has real consequences for them. It is also, far too often, treated as the default rather than as the last resort the law says it should be.

If a surety is going forward, the June 2026 Practice Direction changed how they are dealt with. Defence counsel should prepare the surety declaration, share it with the Crown and file it before the hearing. Where that has been done, the expectation is that examination in chief and cross-examination of the surety are not required. That takes a frightening public interrogation out of the process and replaces it with a document, which means the document has to be right.

The surety still needs to be available at the hearing time. Filing a declaration removes the testimony, not the person, and if release is granted somebody has to be present to enter into it.

One more thing worth saying plainly. If you are already on a release order and something goes wrong, do not wait for your next date to raise it. Breach allegations are prosecuted as separate offences and they are treated as a reliability problem rather than a technicality. Read our page on failure to comply charges before you decide it will sort itself out.

What happens if your Burlington matter moves up to the Superior Court

Fourth fork, and the one with the longest consequences.

Not every criminal charge stays in the Ontario Court of Justice. Summary conviction matters do. Indictable matters carry an election, and the choice among a trial in the Ontario Court of Justice, a Superior Court judge alone, or a Superior Court judge and jury is one of the most consequential decisions in the entire file. In Halton the Superior Court sits at Milton, in the same building as the provincial court, which spares you a second address but does not make the decision any smaller.

What changes when you elect up. In some cases a preliminary inquiry becomes available, which is a hearing where Crown witnesses give evidence under oath before trial and where the defence learns things no written statement would have shown. Jury trial becomes possible, which changes who decides the facts and how the case has to be told. The procedural rules change, the timelines lengthen, and the resources required on both sides increase substantially.

None of that makes electing up right or wrong in the abstract. It depends on the nature of the evidence, on whether credibility is the battleground, on whether there is a legal issue best argued before a Superior Court judge, and on how delay will play out for the particular person charged. Larger fraud files in particular tend to turn on documents and on how a tribunal absorbs them, and our fraud defence page explains why those cases are so often about what the paperwork does not show.

What should never happen is an election made on a first appearance because a form needed filling in. If somebody is asking you to elect before your lawyer has read the disclosure, the answer is to adjourn.

Impaired driving charged in Burlington: two separate fights, one of which starts immediately

Impaired driving deserves its own fork because it is two proceedings wearing one name, and people lose the first one by not realising it has begun.

The criminal charge is heard in the Ontario Court of Justice for Halton. The administrative licence suspension is not a court matter at all. It attaches at the roadside and runs on its own track through the provincial licensing scheme, with its own deadlines that have nothing to do with your court date. People wait for their first appearance before doing anything, by which point options on the administrative side have quietly expired.

Then there is the vehicle, the insurance consequence, the ignition interlock question and, for anyone who is not a citizen, the immigration exposure that sits behind a criminal conviction. All of that is live from the first week.

On the criminal side these cases are technical in a way that rewards early work. Breath testing follows a statutory scheme with demands, timing requirements, calibration and qualified operators, and the documents either support the readings or they do not. Refusal charges run on different ground again, where what was said, when, and whether the demand was lawful all matter. We cover the machinery on our impaired driving and over eighty pages.

And remember the earlier fork. If the stop happened on the QEW, the 403 or the 407, you are probably dealing with an OPP file rather than a Halton Regional Police one, with everything that implies for how quickly the material arrives.

Domestic charges in Burlington, and why the integrated court you read about is not available here

Domestic charges bring a fork nobody wants: a criminal prosecution and, very often, a family law proceeding running at the same time about the same household.

If you have read about the Integrated Domestic Violence Court, which hears the criminal and family aspects of a family before a single judge, here is the honest position. It is the only court of its kind in Canada and it operates in Toronto only. Eligibility requires the family matter to be at 47 Sheppard Avenue East or 311 Jarvis Street and the criminal matter at 10 Armoury Street. A Burlington family cannot access it.

So in Halton the two proceedings run separately, before different judges, on different timetables, with different rules of evidence and different standards of proof. What you say in one can be used in the other. A no contact condition imposed on release can cut directly across a parenting arrangement, and the criminal court is rarely the place where that gets resolved sensitively.

Which is why the release conditions in a domestic file deserve real attention at the bail stage rather than acceptance in the hope of sorting it out later. Conditions are much easier to shape before they are imposed than to vary afterwards. Our domestic assault page deals with how these files are prosecuted in Ontario and why withdrawal by a complainant does not end them.

No internet for your virtual appearance? Halton has published an answer.

This one is small, practical and almost never mentioned anywhere else, so it belongs on the page.

A great deal of criminal case management now happens by video. Unless a judicial officer directs otherwise, accused persons and counsel may attend criminal case management court virtually or in person. That is a convenience if you have a reliable connection, a private room and a device that works. It is a serious problem if you do not, and the people most likely not to have those things are also the people least able to absorb a missed appearance.

Halton Regional Police publish that the Oakville Public Library has set up space to assist people who have a virtual court appearance and no internet access, with a letter explaining how to book a spot. That is a real, published, local answer to a problem most firms pretend does not exist.

Say something early if this affects you. There are also grounds to ask the court to vary the mode of appearance rather than leave you improvising on the morning, and that request lands far better made in advance than explained afterwards. Guilty pleas are a separate matter and are generally taken in person unless narrow consent conditions are met.

We have no Burlington office. Here is how a Halton file actually gets covered.

Straight answer: Kazandji Law does not have an office in Burlington. We are not going to dress up a meeting room or a mailing address as a local presence, because it would be the only dishonest sentence on a page built entirely around correcting things people get told.

What we do is appear where the case is. For Halton that means 491 Steeles Avenue East in Milton, the Crown office in that building, and virtual case management appearances where the Court permits them. Our Oakville office is in Halton Region, which is convenient, but convenience is not the point. The point is who stands up in the courtroom and whether they have read the material.

It is worth being clear about how little of a modern criminal file happens in an office at all. Disclosure arrives electronically. Crown pre-trials are conducted by phone or video. Case management is frequently virtual. The moments that must happen in a room are the bail hearing, the plea and the trial, and every one of those happens in a courthouse that no firm owns.

So test for the things that actually matter. Has counsel read the disclosure, all of it, including the parts that hurt? Will they tell you the unwelcome answer early instead of the comfortable one late? Is the person you meet the person who will be on their feet when it counts?

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal defence and family law firm led by Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner. We defend Criminal Code charges across Ontario and we appear at the court that hears the case, not the one nearest our door.

Our offices:

• Toronto (head office): 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5
• Thornhill: 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, serving Markham and York Region clients
• North York
• Oakville

None of those is in Burlington. For a Halton matter we travel to Milton, which is where the criminal court for this region sits. You can read about the kinds of results we pursue on our case results page.

Consultations are free and confidential. The first conversation is usually worth having early, because it is where you find out whether the thing worrying you is the real problem or whether the real problem is somewhere else in the file.

Burlington criminal defence questions

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Ontario and about the courts serving Burlington and Halton Region. It is not legal advice and reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship. Court listings, contact details and local practice change, so confirm anything time sensitive before acting on it. Every case turns on its own facts and on the disclosure in it. If you are facing a charge, speak to a lawyer about your own situation.