Richmond Hill Criminal Defence Lawyers

Richmond Hill has a courthouse, but not for criminal charges

There is a courthouse in Richmond Hill. The address is 855 Major Mackenzie Drive East, postal code L4B 4X7. It is a real provincial court location, it appears in the government's own directory of court locations, and it has a phone number, 905-731-2664. None of that makes it a criminal court.

Ontario publishes a list of every provincial court location in the province. There are 144 of them. One is in Richmond Hill. When you open that listing, the section headed Types of court and contacts shows a single entry: small claims. No criminal. No criminal youth. No Crown Attorney's Office. No Victim/Witness Assistance Program. The Superior Court of Justice is blunter still, and titles its own page for the building Richmond Hill, Small Claims Courthouse.

This matters because search results and older directory listings tend to blur the distinction. A person who has just been released on an undertaking types the name of their town plus the word courthouse, finds an address six minutes from home, and assumes the problem is small. Then the first appearance date arrives and the address on the paperwork is somewhere else entirely.

The real answer is simpler. Richmond Hill has a small claims courthouse. If you are suing a contractor over a deck, that is your building. If you have been charged under the Criminal Code, it is not, and nothing you do at that counter will move your case forward. Court fees cannot even be paid there. The provincial listing says so directly, under Payment options.

We say this on the first screen rather than the fifth because getting it wrong costs people a day off work and a missed appearance. A missed appearance is its own charge.

What 855 Major Mackenzie Drive East actually does

It is worth understanding what the Richmond Hill courthouse is for, because a surprising number of people end up there for the wrong reason and a smaller number end up there for the right one.

The building handles small claims matters. The provincial listing gives one phone number for it and one court type. French language services are available at that location both over the phone and at the counter, which is a useful detail if English is not the language you are most comfortable arguing in. The accessibility coordinator for the location is published by name and can be contacted in advance if you need accommodations for a proceeding.

There is a second wrinkle that trips up even people with a legitimate small claims matter. The Superior Court of Justice page for Richmond Hill carries a notice in plain language: this location is not open for filings. If you want to issue or file small claims documents, the court directs you to the Small Claims Court Administration Office at the Le Parc Office Tower, 8500 Leslie Street, Suite 395. That office is in Markham, postal code L3T 7M8, and it shares the same telephone number, 905-731-2664.

So Richmond Hill's one courthouse is a hearing venue for one type of civil claim, with its filing counter in another municipality. General inquiries for the location go to Richmondhill.courts@ontario.ca.

If you are reading this because of a criminal charge, none of the above applies to you. It is here so that you can stop looking at that building and start looking at the one your paperwork names.

Where York Region criminal cases are really heard

The Newmarket courthouse sits at 50 Eagle Street West, Newmarket, postal code L3Y 6B1. Unlike Richmond Hill, its provincial listing is long. The court types shown there are civil, criminal, criminal youth, Crown Attorney's Office, divisional, enforcement, family, Victim/Witness Assistance Program and small claims.

The direct numbers are published. Criminal and criminal youth matters both run through 905-853-4801. The Crown Attorney's Office is 905-853-4800, with an email address for counsel and self represented accused at VirtualCrownNewmarket@ontario.ca. The Victim/Witness Assistance Program is 905-853-4818. Civil, family, divisional, enforcement and small claims all share 905-853-4809.

Hours are worth planning around. Court offices at Newmarket run Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Counter service is much narrower: 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., then 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. If you drive up at one in the afternoon expecting to hand something across a counter, you will wait an hour. Unlike Richmond Hill, Newmarket does take payment, by credit card, debit, cash, cheque or money order.

The Superior Court of Justice also sits at Newmarket, and it publishes a separate criminal scheduling contact list. The events it schedules there are trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and bail reviews, ninety day detention review hearings, criminal applications and motions, assignment court, and summary conviction appeals. All of those route through Newmarket.SCJ.TC@ontario.ca or 905-853-4823 extension 6.

We want to be precise about the limits of what that proves. No published rule says in so many words that a charge laid in Richmond Hill must be heard at Newmarket. What the primary sources do show is this: the provincial directory lists no criminal court in Richmond Hill, and the Ontario Court of Justice location in York Region that lists criminal and criminal youth is Newmarket. Your own paperwork is the authority on where you personally must appear. Read it, and read it again before you drive anywhere.

Newmarket, not Richmond Hill, is what your paperwork will say

The single most reliable document in your possession right now is the release paper an officer handed you, or the summons that arrived in the mail. It carries a date, a time and an address. That address governs.

People get into trouble by trusting memory instead. An officer says a few sentences at the end of a long night, someone hears the word court, and the address never registers. Weeks later the date is remembered and the location is guessed. Guessing produces a failure to appear, and a failure to appear is a fresh charge under the Criminal Code that sits on top of whatever you were originally facing. It also hardens the Crown's position on release, because now there is a documented reason to doubt you will come back.

So before anything else, take a photograph of every page of your release document, front and back, and send it somewhere you will not lose it. Do the same with any surety declaration, any undertaking, and any conditions sheet. Conditions are where quiet disasters happen. A no contact condition that names an address you still have keys to, a curfew that conflicts with a shift, a weapons prohibition in a household where someone hunts. None of those fix themselves.

If your document names Newmarket, you are going to Newmarket. If it names something else, you go where it says. If it names a virtual appearance, there will be a link or a dial in number and you should test it the day before, not five minutes before.

One more small thing that saves people real money. Court appearances are frequently short and frequently adjourned. Counsel can often appear on your behalf for routine set date appearances, which means you are not burning a personal day to stand in a hallway for four minutes. Ask about that early rather than after you have already booked the time off.

York Regional Police 2 District and who it covers

Richmond Hill is policed by York Regional Police out of #2 District, at 171 Major Mackenzie Drive West, postal code L4C 5J1. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The non emergency line is 1-866-876-5423, and the district front desk sits at extension 7200 of that number.

York Regional Police publishes its own numbers for the district, and they give a useful sense of scale. #2 District serves roughly 285,000 residents. It handled 23,941 calls for service in 2025. It has 213 sworn members and 8 civilian police professionals. The district commander is Superintendent Kolin Alexander. #2 District is also home to the York Regional Police memorial wall, which honours officers killed in the line of duty.

There is a small geographical coincidence that locals notice immediately. Both of Richmond Hill's justice addresses sit on the same road. The courthouse is at 855 Major Mackenzie Drive East. The police district is at 171 Major Mackenzie Drive West. Same street, opposite directions, entirely different functions, and only one of them has anything to do with a criminal charge.

Practically, the district building is where a great deal of the early part of a case happens. It is where property gets logged, where breath samples get taken in impaired driving matters, where statements get recorded, and where people are held before they go anywhere else. If you are ever sitting in that building, the useful sentence is short and you should say it out loud: I am not answering questions and I want to speak to a lawyer. Then stop talking. That right exists at every hour of the day and the phone call is free.

What happens in those first few hours shapes the rest of the file more than almost anything a lawyer does later.

Thornhill addresses, two police districts, one courthouse

Thornhill is where this gets confusing, and we would rather explain the confusion than pretend it does not exist.

Thornhill is not a municipality. It is a community that straddles the boundary between Markham and Vaughan. York Regional Police organises itself into five districts, and on its own website it describes #2 District's reach in more than one way. The index of districts says #2 District serves Richmond Hill. The #2 District page itself opens by saying officers serve nearly 285,000 people in Richmond Hill and in the Thornhill area of Markham and Vaughan. Further down the same page it says residents and businesses in Richmond Hill, Vaughan, and the Thornhill communities of Vaughan and Markham can count on #2 District officers.

Those are three descriptions of the same district. We are not going to pretend one of them is the authoritative boundary, because the police service itself has not settled on a single wording. Treat the boundary description as approximate. If the precise district matters to your case, ask, and ask the service directly.

What is not ambiguous is the rest of the map. #4 District covers Vaughan and southern parts of King Township, from 2700 Rutherford Road, postal code L4K 2N9. #5 District covers Markham and Whitchurch Stouffville, from 8700 McCowan Road, postal code L3P 3M2. Both are open around the clock, like #2 District. So a Thornhill address can plausibly involve more than one district depending on which side of a boundary it sits.

Here is the part that simplifies everything. Whichever York Region district lays the charge, the criminal listing for the region points to the same courthouse. Three police districts, one criminal court location. If you live in Thornhill and something happened in Markham or in Vaughan, the drive at the end of it is still north.

The overnight question: where you go before a justice

The question we get asked at two in the morning, more than any other, is some version of this: he was arrested in Richmond Hill, so is there a bail court in Richmond Hill. There is not. No criminal court and no bail court is listed for Richmond Hill in the provincial directory.

What there is, is a process, and since June 2026 that process has been governed by a province wide practice direction on bail hearings issued by Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas of the Ontario Court of Justice. It applies to weekday bail courts and to Weekend and Statutory Holiday courts, usually called WASH courts. It is worth knowing what it says, because it sets expectations you can hold people to.

The direction states that all reasonable steps should be taken to accommodate bail hearings, whether or not on consent, on the same day the parties are ready to proceed. Every proposed consent release put before the court is to be accommodated the same day. The court expects routine contested bail hearings to be completed in no longer than thirty minutes, and consent releases in no longer than fifteen, both subject to the presiding judicial officer's discretion.

There is also a category called a Complex Bail Matter. Where a case has two or more listed features, such as two or more proposed sureties the Crown wants to cross examine, a need for an interpreter, a section 524 application with two or more existing release orders, or a specialized prosecution team matter, counsel can identify it as complex. A complex matter becomes eligible for additional court time, which will not ordinarily exceed two hours, and it is to be heard the same day it is identified as complex.

None of that speed happens by itself. It happens because someone on your side has the release plan ready, the surety declaration sworn and the Crown spoken to before the matter is called. Our bail hearing work is built around exactly that preparation, and the same principles apply whether the hearing is happening in York Region or through our Toronto bail practice.

Sureties who have to drive north

A surety is a person who promises the court they will supervise you and pledges money if you breach. The choice of surety is one of the few parts of a bail hearing you actually control, and for a Richmond Hill family it comes with a logistical problem: the hearing is not happening in Richmond Hill.

The 2026 practice direction changed several things that used to make sureties dread the day. It states plainly that 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, regardless of onus, and that all parties must consider and propose alternatives to a surety release where appropriate. That is a meaningful shift. The old assumption that somebody always has to sign for you is no longer the starting point.

Where a surety is proposed, defence counsel should prepare the surety declaration, share it with the Crown, and file it with the court in advance of the hearing. The court expects declarations to be completed, signed and sworn before filing. Where the declaration has been filed, the expectation is that examination in chief and cross examination of the surety are not required at all. If the Crown wants to cross examine anyway, it has to identify the issues, the purpose and a time estimate.

Two provisions specifically help people who would otherwise be driving. If a surety's attendance is required to confirm the contents of a declaration under oath, the surety may attend by audio video conference unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. And where it is not feasible for the surety to sign the release order in the presence of the court, the presiding judicial officer may dispense with a physical signature, provided the officer is satisfied the surety understands and accepts the obligations, including the financial one.

What has not changed: sureties should make themselves available at the time of the hearing so that if release is ordered it can be entered into immediately. Availability still means keeping the whole day clear. When we prepare a surety through our Ontario bail practice, the briefing covers the money, the supervision expectations and the real consequences of calling the police on your own family member, because a surety who has not thought that through is a surety who gets rejected.

Disclosure and the Newmarket Crown Attorney's office

Disclosure is the Crown's file: the officer's notes, the statements, the video, the forensic reports, the call recordings. You are entitled to it, and until you have it nobody can tell you honestly what your case is worth.

For York Region criminal matters, the Crown Attorney's Office at Newmarket is reachable at 905-853-4800, and the published email address is VirtualCrownNewmarket@ontario.ca. The Victim/Witness Assistance Program, which supports complainants and witnesses rather than accused people, runs at 905-853-4818 from the same courthouse.

The bail practice direction sets a separate and earlier expectation for the bail stage. It says the Crown is expected to continue to provide a bail package to defence counsel in advance so counsel can adequately prepare. For a contested hearing, the expectation is that in many cases the only materials the Crown files will be the criminal record if there is one, the synopsis or summary of allegations, and copies of any prior release orders. If either side thinks more is needed for a fair hearing, that material has to be summarised down to the parts actually relied on, or presented as an oral summary.

A bail package is not full disclosure. It is a snapshot assembled quickly, and the gap between that snapshot and the complete file is where a lot of cases are won. First disclosure often arrives incomplete. Video is missing, notes are illegible, a named officer has no notes at all, a 911 recording was never pulled. Chasing those gaps is ordinary defence work, and it is slow work, which is one reason the first few months of a case can feel like nothing is happening.

The substance of the review changes with the charge. An assault file lives or dies on injury evidence and the sequence of who did what first. A domestic violence file turns on the 911 call, the timeline and the relationship history. A sexual offence file involves screening rules about what can even be asked. A theft file usually turns on continuity of the property and the quality of the identification.

Traffic and by-law tickets go somewhere else entirely

If you have a speeding ticket, a careless driving charge, a parking penalty or a by-law matter, none of the above applies. Provincial offences are a completely separate system, administered by York Region rather than by the province's criminal courts.

York Region's own courts pages publish one court location. It is listed as Newmarket, code 4960, at 17150 Yonge Street, second floor, Newmarket, postal code L3Y 8V3. The phone numbers are 905-898-0425 or 1-877-331-3309, and the general email is courtservices@york.ca. The front counter is walk in only, Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., closed on civic and statutory holidays. The prosecution office keeps narrower hours, 8:30 a.m. to noon and 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

York Region states that its provincial offences early resolution meetings, hearings and trials are conducted either online or in person in Newmarket. We are deliberately not publishing a Richmond Hill street address for provincial offences court, because neither the province nor the Region publishes one.

The clock is short. If you receive an offence notice, you must choose one of three options within 15 days: pay the fine, meet a prosecutor for early resolution, or request a trial. Ignore it and you can be convicted in your absence with additional costs added. Payments can be made online, by phone, in person or by mail, though partial payments are not accepted online. It can take up to ten days from the day you receive a ticket before it appears in the online system. York Region warns that the only accepted online payment platform is paytickets.ca and that it does not accept e-transfers, which is worth remembering given the volume of fake unpaid fine texts circulating.

Disclosure exists here too. You have a right to the officer's notes and other relevant evidence. Part I requests go to 4960disclosure@york.ca and Part III requests to Part3Disclosure@york.ca, and you need a scheduled trial date before you can request it. For a Part I summons arising from a collision, wait at least two weeks after the offence date. For a Part III summons, wait at least four. At an early resolution meeting, only the officer's notes are provided.

The line between a ticket and a charge is not always where people expect. Careless driving is provincial. Dangerous driving is criminal, and it goes to a different building with different consequences. If you are unsure which one you are holding, that is a question worth asking before the fifteen days run out.

Appealing a provincial offence conviction

Losing at provincial offences court is not the end of it, but the appeal route has conditions that surprise people, and one of them costs money up front.

York Region sets out the right plainly: you may appeal your conviction, your sentence, or both, within 30 days of the conviction or sentence date, for proceedings under Part I, Part II or Part III of the Provincial Offences Act. Thirty days is not long, and it runs from the decision, not from the day you decide you are unhappy about it.

The condition that catches people is this. You have to pay your fine, including costs, the victim fine surcharge and any other fees, before you can file your Notice of Appeal. Keep the receipt. The Region states you will need proof of payment before your appeal documents are accepted for filing. So the sequence is pay first, file second, which feels backwards to almost everyone who hears it. There is a published route for filing an appeal without paying the fine, and a separate route for filing after the thirty days have passed, but both are exceptions you have to actively pursue rather than defaults.

The paperwork splits by part. Part I and Part II appeals use one package, covering traffic ticket decisions on an Offence Notice, motor vehicle collision decisions on a Summons, and parking ticket decisions. Part III appeals, which arise from a Summons, use a different package. Transcripts usually have to be ordered, and ordering them takes time you do not have much of.

Service matters too. The Region's front counter accepts service of appeals, motions involving appeals, factums, transcripts and books of authority for Part I and Part III municipal offences with the Regional Prosecutor. That counter is in Newmarket, and it is walk in only during posted hours, so an appeal from a Richmond Hill ticket involves at least one more trip north than the original ticket did.

Our advice is to decide quickly. Most provincial offences appeals fail not on the merits but on timing and on the paperwork conditions attached to filing.

Summary conviction appeals from the Ontario Court of Justice

Criminal appeals are a different animal again, and the venue is different from both of the above.

When a summary conviction matter is decided in the Ontario Court of Justice, the appeal is heard by the Superior Court of Justice. The Superior Court sitting at Newmarket publishes summary conviction appeals in its criminal scheduling list, alongside trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and reviews, ninety day detention review hearings, criminal applications and motions, and assignment court. The scheduling contact for all of those is Newmarket.SCJ.TC@ontario.ca or 905-853-4823 extension 6.

Two things are worth understanding before anyone starts talking about an appeal. First, an appeal is not a second trial. Nobody calls the witnesses again and asks the court to prefer a different version of events. An appeal argues that something went wrong in law, or that the verdict was unreasonable on the evidence that was actually before the court. Those are narrow doors.

Second, the record is everything. If a point was never raised at trial, raising it for the first time on appeal is difficult. If something was said in argument but never got on the record properly, it may as well not have happened. This is why the quality of work at the trial stage, including the unglamorous business of making objections and preserving positions, determines whether an appeal is even available later.

Note also that the Superior Court at Newmarket is where bail reviews are heard. A bail review is not an appeal of a conviction. It is a challenge to a detention order or to conditions that are too onerous, and it is a separate and often faster route than most people realise. The ninety day detention review hearing listed in the same schedule is another mechanism worth knowing about for anyone who has been held in custody while a case drags.

If you are in the position of having lost something and wanting to know whether it can be revisited, the first call should happen quickly, because appeal periods are short and they do not pause while you think about it.

Why a lawyer without a Richmond Hill office can still run your case

Kazandji Law does not have an office in Richmond Hill. Our offices are in Toronto at 180 John Street, Unit 320, in Thornhill at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, in North York at 70 Forest Manor Road, Unit 4B, and in Oakville at 466 Speers Road.

Here is the part that is actually relevant. Our Thornhill office at 7191 Yonge Street sits inside the area York Regional Police describes as part of #2 District, the same district that polices Richmond Hill. That is not a marketing claim. It comes from the police service's own description of the district, which names the Thornhill area alongside Richmond Hill.

More to the point, an office in Richmond Hill would not help you anyway, because your case is not in Richmond Hill. There is no criminal court there to walk to. What matters for a York Region criminal matter is whether your lawyer appears regularly at the courthouse that does handle these cases, knows the local Crown office practices, and can get to a bail hearing on short notice. Proximity to a small claims counter is worth nothing.

Plenty of work now happens without anyone driving anywhere. Judicial pre-trials, set dates and many routine appearances are handled remotely or by counsel on your behalf. Documents move by email. The Crown office publishes an email address for exactly that purpose. The days when a criminal case required both you and your lawyer to be physically present in the same building every few weeks are gone.

Where charges overlap with a separation or a parenting dispute, which happens constantly in domestic files, the criminal conditions and the family law issues have to be handled together rather than by two firms who never speak. Being able to do both under one roof is worth considerably more than a local address.

Costs people forget: travel, time off work, and a second trip north

The legal fee is the number everyone asks about first. It is rarely the number that hurts most, and for a Richmond Hill resident with a York Region case it is often not even the largest one.

Start with time. A criminal matter is not one appearance. It is a first appearance, then set dates while disclosure is chased, then a judicial pre-trial, then possibly a trial date months out. Each of those is a block of a working day, not an hour, because court does not run on your schedule and matters get stood down. If you are paid hourly, every one of those days is money gone. If you are salaried, it is a pattern of absences your employer eventually notices, and explaining why is its own problem.

Then the driving. Newmarket is well north of Richmond Hill, and the trip happens during the morning rush because that is when court starts. Add parking. Add the fact that if you bring a surety, a parent or a partner, that is two or three people's days, not one. Families routinely underestimate this by a factor of three.

There is a certain historical symmetry to it. The City's own account of its origins describes a settlement that grew because people travelled up and down Yonge Street to and from communities further north. Two centuries later, a criminal charge still sends Richmond Hill residents north up the same corridor.

Then the second system. If the incident produced both a criminal charge and a provincial offence, and roadside matters often do, you are dealing with two separate venues, two separate sets of deadlines and two separate counters, both of them in Newmarket but not in the same building. The provincial offences counter is walk in only during posted hours. That is a second trip north, not a stop on the way to the first.

Then the quiet costs nobody budgets for. A licence suspension that turns a twenty minute commute into a ninety minute one. A condition that means moving out of your own home. A travel restriction that kills a trip already paid for. A disclosed charge that ends a professional licence application. These are the consequences that outlast the case.

The way to reduce all of it is the same in every file: get advice before the first appearance rather than after the third, so that decisions about pleas, timing and resolution meetings are made once, deliberately, instead of repeatedly and under pressure. If you want to talk it through, our contact page has the direct numbers, and we take Richmond Hill and Woodbridge area matters regularly.