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If you have been charged in Etobicoke, start with the address, because most of what you will find online about the Etobicoke courthouse is out of date. Since 2023, Etobicoke criminal matters have been heard downtown at the Toronto Courthouse, 10 Armoury Street. Bail happens somewhere else entirely. This page sets out what changed, what did not, and where your file actually goes at each stage.

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

If you have been told your Etobicoke case is at 2201 Finch, here is what changed

For decades the answer was simple. Charged anywhere in Etobicoke, and your case went to the Toronto West courthouse at 2201 Finch Avenue West. That stopped being true in 2023. A good deal of what is still sitting on law firm websites, directory listings and old printouts has not caught up.

We see what that costs people. Someone drives up to Finch Avenue for a set date, finds a building that is open and busy but is not running their matter, and loses the day. Worse is the person who assumes the address on a website is current and never checks. Missing a court date is not a small administrative problem. It can produce a bench warrant, and failing to attend court is itself a criminal offence, separate from whatever you were charged with in the first place.

So let us fix the picture before anything else. Etobicoke criminal charges are now heard at the Toronto Courthouse, 10 Armoury Street. That building is the Ontario Court of Justice criminal courthouse for the whole city. 2201 Finch Avenue West is still open and still busy, but it does one job now instead of many.

If you are holding paperwork that names Finch Avenue, do not panic, and do not assume it is wrong either. A bail document or a release form may legitimately point there, because bail genuinely does still happen at that address. What matters is which stage of the case you are at. Bail is Finch Avenue. Everything after that is Armoury Street. Both parts are set out below.

And if your own documents do not make it obvious which is which, that is a phone call, not a guess. Getting the building right is the cheapest win available to you in this entire process.

What actually happened in 2023, and which six courthouses closed into one

The Ontario Court of Justice describes the new Toronto courthouse as a 17-storey building at 10 Armoury Street that amalgamated six Ontario Court of Justice criminal courthouse locations from across the city. That is the whole story in one sentence, and it explains why so much online information about Toronto courthouses went stale all at once.

Six buildings became one. Etobicoke matters were part of that move, and so were Scarborough matters, North York matters and the downtown caseload. Here is what closed into what.

Read that table and the persistence of the confusion makes sense. Five of those six addresses simply vanished from the court list of locations. The sixth, 2201 Finch Avenue West, stayed open but changed jobs entirely. If your mental map of Toronto criminal courts was formed before 2023, essentially all of it needs redrawing.

There is a second reason this matters beyond directions. Consolidation moved the Crown offices too. The prosecutor assigned to an Etobicoke file used to sit in a building on Finch Avenue carrying a west end caseload. Toronto provincial Crown counsel now work out of Armoury Street. That changes who reads your file first and who we are talking to about it.

The Toronto Courthouse at 10 Armoury Street: what is in the building

Ten Armoury Street is a purpose-built high-rise courthouse, seventeen storeys of it, a short walk north of the downtown core. For an Etobicoke client the practical point is that almost everything in your Ontario Court of Justice matter now happens under one roof: first appearances, case management, guilty pleas, sentencing, and trials in the provincial court.

The building also holds specialized courts. The Ontario Court of Justice lists mental health courts, Gladue courts, a drug treatment court and youth courts among them. Those are not footnotes. For some clients the right specialized stream is the entire defence strategy, and the routing decision tends to arrive earlier than people expect. If mental health, addiction or Indigenous heritage is part of your circumstances, raise it at the first meeting rather than the fifth.

Toronto provincial Crown counsel are in the building, and so is the federal prosecution service that runs drug charges under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Having the courtroom, the Crown and the federal prosecutors in one place is more efficient than the old arrangement. It also means the building is large and genuinely busy, and finding the right floor on a first visit takes longer than anyone budgets for. Come early.

So what is still at 2201 Finch Avenue West?

Bail. That is the short answer, and it is the piece competitors get wrong in one direction or the other. Some still tell you the Etobicoke courthouse is on Finch, which is years out of date. Others say everything moved downtown, which sends a worried family to the wrong building on the worst morning of their lives.

The Ontario Court of Justice established the Toronto Region Bail Centre at 2201 Finch Avenue West, and it states that the centre accommodates all adult bail operations as well as weekend and statutory holiday bail court. The court record for that address lists its criminal case management court as not applicable, which confirms the point. The building does bail, and only bail.

Two things follow for anyone arrested in Etobicoke. First, a Saturday or holiday arrest still gets a hearing, because weekend and statutory holiday bail court runs out of that centre. Nobody sits until Monday because the courts are shut. Second, the bail centre sits on Finch Avenue West in the northwest of the city, not in Etobicoke itself, so a surety driving up from south Etobicoke is facing a real trip rather than a short hop.

Legal Aid Ontario has duty counsel at the bail centre, and duty counsel can assist at a hearing. They are a real resource and they are not a substitute for counsel you have retained on a serious charge. Where a contested bail hearing is a live possibility, the work that decides the result happens before the hearing starts: the release plan, the proposed surety, the conditions you are prepared to accept and the ones you should be resisting.

Your case is routed by police division, and Etobicoke means 22 and 23

Here is a detail that is true, checkable, and almost entirely absent from other Etobicoke pages. At 10 Armoury Street the adult case management courtrooms are assigned by police division. Not by offence type, not alphabetically, and not by which lawyer you hired. By the division that laid the charge.

Courtroom 201 is the west end room. The court assigns it adult matters from Police Divisions 11, 12, 13, 22 and 23. Divisions 22 and 23 are the Etobicoke divisions, so an Etobicoke charge is routed into Courtroom 201 along with the rest of the west end caseload. Youth case management runs separately, in Courtroom 604, where the schedule sets Monday aside for west end matters.

Why should that matter to you rather than only to us? Partly because you need to know which courtroom to report to on your first date, and a seventeen storey building is an unforgiving place to guess. But mostly because of what sits behind the room. The Crown team working that courtroom sees your file before anyone else does, so the first position taken on your case gets formed there. And when disclosure runs late, which it often does, knowing the room means knowing whose desk to chase instead of firing a general complaint into a very large building.

It also explains something clients find strange on their first attendance. The room is full of people whose charges have nothing in common with theirs. They are there because the same divisions arrested them, not because the allegations resemble each other. Grouping by division is an administrative convenience for the court, and once you know that, the morning makes considerably more sense.

One more practical consequence. Because the room is organised by division rather than by offence, the list on a given morning can run long, and matters are not called in the order people arrive. Counsel who are in that room regularly know how the list tends to move, and can often get a short administrative matter dealt with early. Someone attending alone, holding a piece of paper and hoping to be noticed, can sit through most of a morning before anybody says their name. That is not a criticism of the court. It is how a high volume list works, and it is worth knowing before you plan your day around it.

22 Division on Bloor, 23 Division on Finch, and the divisions people confuse with them

Etobicoke is policed by two Toronto Police Service divisions, and only two.

• 22 Division, 3699 Bloor Street West, Toronto M9A 1A2. Telephone 416-808-2200.
• 23 Division, 5230 Finch Avenue West, Toronto M9V 0A1. Telephone 416-808-2300.

Now the corrections, because this is where published information tends to fall apart. 11 Division, on Davenport Road, is not Etobicoke. It covers the west end of the old City of Toronto, which is High Park, Parkdale and the Junction. 12 Division, on Trethewey Drive, is not Etobicoke either. It covers the former City of York, including Weston and Mount Dennis. Both of those divisions sit in Courtroom 201 alongside the Etobicoke divisions, which is very likely how the confusion started, but neither one polices Etobicoke.

There is a reason to care about this beyond pedantry. When someone has been arrested and the family is trying to find them, the division holding them is the single most useful fact available, and calling the wrong station burns hours nobody has. The same goes for property. If a phone, a vehicle or a laptop was seized, it sits with the investigating division, and the process of getting it back starts there.

For completeness, the Toronto Police Service currently has sixteen divisions across the city, numbered 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 51, 52, 53 and 55. A reference to a division number that is not on that list is either very old or simply wrong.

From the bail centre to Armoury Street: how your file moves

Put the two buildings together and the shape of an Etobicoke case comes into focus.

It starts at 22 or 23 Division. The officer in charge makes an early call: release you from the station on conditions, or hold you for a bail hearing. That decision gets made quickly and on thin information, which is one reason getting counsel involved in the first hours is worth far more than most people assume.

If you are held, the next stop is the Toronto Region Bail Centre on Finch Avenue West. A person held for a hearing has to be brought before a justice promptly, and in practice that means the next available bail court, weekends included. That hearing is where a release plan either holds together or comes apart, and it is very hard to repair afterwards.

Once you are released the file goes downtown. Case management, disclosure, the Crown pre-trial, the judicial pre-trial, and then a plea or a trial. All of it at 10 Armoury Street, in the courtroom assigned to your division. After release the bail centre drops out of the day to day of the case.

Two buildings, two very different drives, and the switch between them happens on the day you are released, which is exactly when nobody is thinking about logistics. Write both addresses down while things are calm.

The Toronto Crown after consolidation, and who you are actually negotiating with

Before 2023 each Toronto criminal courthouse had its own Crown Attorney office, and the office attached to 2201 Finch Avenue West was formally named for Etobicoke. A west end file was screened by west end prosecutors who knew the local police, the local courtrooms and each other. That arrangement is gone. Toronto provincial Crown counsel now work from 10 Armoury Street.

Consolidation cuts both ways for the defence. One large office means more consistency in Crown policy and, in principle, a steadier approach to resolution across the city. It also means the individual assigned to your matter may have no particular connection to Etobicoke, so the informal local knowledge that used to move files along has to be replaced by something written down and properly argued.

What has not changed is what screening does. The Crown assesses early whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and whether a prosecution is in the public interest, then settles on a position for resolution. Getting our material in front of the right person before that position hardens is often worth more than anything that happens months later. A carefully assembled package on a first offence theft charge, or on an assault allegation where the complainant account has real problems in it, can shift the Crown view while that view is still forming.

Federal prosecutions run on their own track. Drug charges under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are handled by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which also operates out of Armoury Street for Toronto matters. Different office, different counsel, different policies on resolution. If your charge is federal, you are negotiating with a different institution than the one handling, say, a fraud file.

The one thing consolidation did not change: Superior Court is at 361 University

The 2023 consolidation was an Ontario Court of Justice project. It reorganised the provincial criminal courts in Toronto and it left the Superior Court of Justice exactly where it was. Superior Court criminal matters in Toronto are heard at 361 University Avenue, where the Criminal Trial Office sits on the fourth floor.

That matters because a meaningful share of serious cases end up there. If you are charged with an indictable offence and you elect trial by a Superior Court judge, with or without a jury, the matter leaves Armoury Street and moves to University Avenue. The election belongs to you, subject to how the offence is classified, and it is not a decision to make at a counter on a busy morning.

So an Etobicoke client can end up dealing with three separate buildings over the life of one case. Finch Avenue West for bail. Armoury Street for the provincial court. University Avenue if the matter elects up. Not one competing Etobicoke page mentions the third address, which tells you how little attention has been paid to what the consolidation actually covered.

The change is not only geographic. Superior Court brings a preliminary inquiry in some cases, different disclosure rhythms, longer timelines, jury selection where a jury is chosen, and a much heavier procedural load on both sides. Serious sexual offence allegations and the gravest violence and firearms matters are the ones most likely to travel that route.

Your Highway 427 or Gardiner charge might not be a Toronto Police charge at all

Etobicoke has a great deal of highway running through it. Highway 427 crosses it north to south, the 401 cuts across the top, the Gardiner Expressway runs along the lakeshore, and the QEW arrives from the west. The QEW becomes the Gardiner at Highway 427, and it has done since 1997, though a surprising amount of published material still has that boundary in the wrong place.

The reason to care is jurisdictional. The Ontario Provincial Police patrol the province highways. The Toronto Police Service polices city streets. Two drivers stopped a few kilometres apart in Etobicoke on the same evening can therefore find themselves dealing with entirely different organisations.

The charge proceeds through the Toronto courts either way. What changes is everything underneath it: notebook conventions, in-car camera systems and how long the footage is kept, breath testing equipment and the qualifications of the technician, internal policy on disclosure, and the courtroom experience of the officers you will be cross-examining. On a dangerous driving or impaired driving file those differences are not cosmetic. They are frequently where the defence is found.

One caution about local geography. Highway 27 is mostly a city-maintained road through Etobicoke rather than a provincial highway, so do not assume you were stopped by the OPP simply because the road carries a number.

Tickets, bylaws and the courts that are not criminal courts

A fair number of Etobicoke residents arrive on this page holding something that is not a criminal charge at all, and the distinction is worth five minutes of your time.

The City of Toronto runs its own provincial offences courts, separate from the criminal system. There are three: Toronto South at 92 Front Street East, Toronto East at 1530 Markham Road, and Toronto West at 2700 Eglinton Avenue West. They deal with Highway Traffic Act matters, city bylaw charges and similar provincial offences. None of them hears a Criminal Code charge. And despite the name, the Toronto West court is in York, not Etobicoke.

The line between the two systems is sharper than it looks from outside. Careless driving is a Highway Traffic Act offence and it goes to a provincial offences court. Dangerous driving is a Criminal Code offence and it goes to the Ontario Court of Justice at 10 Armoury Street. The same collision can produce either one depending on how the investigating officer reads it, and the consequences are not remotely comparable. One ends in a fine and demerit points. The other ends in a criminal record.

If you are not certain which one you are holding, look at the document itself. A criminal charge names the Criminal Code and directs you to a court date rather than offering you the option of simply paying. When in doubt, call before the date rather than after it.

Why we drive downtown for Etobicoke clients, and what we do before we get there

We do not have an office in Etobicoke and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Kazandji Law has four offices: Toronto, Thornhill, North York and Oakville. Since 2023 every Etobicoke criminal matter has been heard downtown in any event, so a storefront on Bloor Street would shorten nobody trip, least of all yours.

What actually helps is the work that happens before anyone drives anywhere.

• Getting the disclosure request in immediately, then following it up by name rather than in general terms.
• Building the release plan while it can still be built, instead of repairing it after a hearing has gone badly.
• Reading the disclosure properly. The notes, the video, the timing, and the gaps between what an officer wrote down and what the recording actually shows.
• Attending routine dates on your behalf so you are not burning a day of work for a two minute remand.
• Putting a written position in front of the assigned Crown early, while the file is still open to being reconsidered.

On a great many Ontario Court of Justice matters counsel can appear for you on administrative dates. Some appearances need you there in person and a trial certainly does, and we will tell you which is which rather than leaving you to work it out. Our criminal defence practice covers the full range of charges that come out of 22 and 23 Division, and you can read about results we have obtained for clients elsewhere on this site.

If you want the wider picture of how criminal cases run in this province, our Ontario criminal defence overview covers more ground than a city page sensibly can. Scarborough now runs through the same courthouse and the same bail centre, and our Scarborough criminal defence page covers those buildings from the east end of the city.

Etobicoke covers a lot of ground, from Long Branch and Mimico down on the lake, up through Islington and The Queensway, out to Rexdale in the northwest. Humber Polytechnic has a campus in Etobicoke as well. Wherever in that area the charge was laid, the route it takes afterwards is the one set out on this page, and the first thing we will ask you is which division the officer came from. If you do not know, the paperwork usually does, and where the paperwork is unclear we can find out quickly.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal and family law firm serving Toronto and the surrounding regions. Fadi Matthew Kazandji, our founding partner, built the practice on a plain idea. A client should always know what is happening in their case and why, and nobody should be told an outcome is guaranteed before a word of disclosure has been read.

We work out of four offices.

• Toronto, head office. 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which also serves Markham and York Region.
• North York.
• Oakville.

For an Etobicoke charge the relevant fact is not which office you visit. It is whether your lawyer is in Courtroom 201 on the right morning, has read the file, and knows how the Crown at Armoury Street tends to handle a matter like yours. The first consultation is free, and there is no charge for finding out where you stand.

Twelve questions Etobicoke clients ask

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Toronto and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. Court locations, courtroom assignments and court practices change over time, and you should confirm the details that apply to your own matter before acting on anything set out here. If you have been charged, speak with a lawyer about your specific circumstances.