Markham Drug Import and Export Offence Lawyer

Home › Markham Criminal Defence › Drug Import and Export

Importing is the heaviest allegation in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, a life maximum for Schedule I or II substances, and in York Region it rarely looks like an airport smuggling scene. It arrives by courier. A package gets flagged and opened somewhere upstream, the delivery is allowed to continue, and days later there is a knock at a Markham door. A resident who never crossed a border is suddenly facing the same ceiling as a smuggler, and the whole case turns on one question: did you know what was in the box?

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Serving Markham and all of York Region from our Thornhill office. Updated July 2026.

What section 6 actually prohibits

Section 6(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act says that, except as authorized under the regulations, no person shall import into Canada or export from Canada a substance included in Schedule I, II, III, IV, V or VI. Section 6(2) adds a second offence most people have never heard of: possessing a substance for the purpose of exporting it from Canada. Between them, the two subsections cover movement in both directions and the holding pattern before the outbound movement even starts.

Three features make section 6 broader than people expect. First, it reaches every schedule, including the Schedule VI precursor chemicals used to make other drugs. Simple possession under section 4(1) does not touch Schedule VI; importing does, which is why a barrel of an unglamorous industrial chemical can produce a serious CDSA charge and why precursor files often pair with production allegations. Our Markham production and cultivation guide covers that side. Second, there is no quantity threshold. The offence is the movement, not the amount, though quantity drives sentence. Third, the carve-out is for authorized actors: licensed dealers, researchers, pharmaceutical importers operating under the regulations. Everyone else is inside the prohibition.

One boundary matters just as much: cannabis is not a section 6 substance. Taking cannabis across the border, in either direction, in any amount, is its own offence under section 11 of the Cannabis Act, with a 14-year maximum, even for product bought legally in Ontario. Our Markham cannabis offences guide deals with that rule and the rest of the cannabis edges.

The ceiling is set by the schedule

Section 6(3) builds a ladder, and the schedule of the substance sets the rung. For Schedule I and II substances the count is indictable only and the maximum is life imprisonment, the same ceiling as trafficking. Everything below that is hybrid, meaning the Crown chooses whether to proceed by indictment or summarily.

Substance	Examples	Maximum penalty
Schedule I or II	Fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA	Life imprisonment, indictable only
Schedule III, V or VI	Some psychedelics; listed precursor chemicals	10 years indictable, 18 months summary
Schedule IV	Benzodiazepines, some steroids and sedatives	3 years indictable, 1 year summary
Cannabis, any amount, either direction	Cannabis Act s.11	14 years

Two lines of fine print. The life-maximum rows carry reverse-onus bail, which is dealt with below. And border files sometimes carry a companion count under the Customs Act for smuggling goods whose importation is prohibited or controlled; it is a separate statute with its own machinery, and where it appears we defend the two counts together as one case.

No minimums since 2022, and what that does not mean

For a decade, importing carried mandatory minimum sentences: one year, and two years where a Schedule I substance exceeded one kilogram. Bill C-5 repealed them, in force November 17, 2022, and today no CDSA offence carries a mandatory minimum. That change also reopened the conditional sentence: because section 742.1 now bars community sentences only where an offence has a minimum or falls in a short list of exclusions, a conditional sentence is legally available for importing whenever the fit sentence is under two years and the statutory criteria are met.

The Supreme Court's decision in Sharma shows how recent that shift is, and why old advice misleads. Ms. Sharma was a young paid courier caught at Toronto's airport with almost two kilograms of cocaine. The old law barred a conditional sentence for her offence, she challenged that bar under the Charter, and on November 4, 2022 the Supreme Court upheld the bar and restored her 18-month jail sentence. Thirteen days later, Bill C-5 came into force and repealed the very provisions the Court had upheld. Anyone telling you a community sentence is impossible on an importing conviction is quoting law that no longer exists. Anyone telling you it is likely is ignoring how these cases are actually sentenced: the Supreme Court in Parranto confirmed that wholesale hard-drug sentencing remains severe, and importing sits at the top of the gravity scale. The honest position is in the middle. The range is open, the argument is real, and the outcome is built from the facts, the role you played and the record you bring.

How an importing file reaches a Markham address

These prosecutions almost never start in York Region. They start upstream, at a port of entry, an international mail centre or an air cargo facility, where a shipment is examined and a substance is found. What happens next is the part that surprises people: the parcel is not simply seized. Investigators often let it continue on its journey under supervision, a controlled delivery, so that somebody accepts it at the destination address. The arrest happens at or after the handoff, in a driveway or a front hall in Markham, and by then the case has been under construction for days or weeks.

The York end of that machinery is real and verifiable. In December 2024, York Regional Police launched Project Endless, working in partnership with the Ontario Provincial Police Border Drug Interdiction Task Force and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, investigating the importing and exporting of large quantities of controlled substances. By October 2025 it had produced five search warrants at GTA residences, eight suspects, 34 charges, and seizures that included 26 kilograms of methamphetamine, 5 kilograms of cocaine and 1 kilogram of fentanyl, along with firearms and 300,000 dollars in cash. YRP's joint-forces partners also include the Canada Border Services Agency. That is the environment a Markham importing allegation lives in: multiple agencies, long timelines, and layers of paperwork generated before you ever knew a file existed.

For the defence, that layered structure is not just background. Every agency that touched the shipment left records, and every handoff between them is a seam: what the border examination found and on what authority, who repackaged the substance, who monitored the delivery, who wrote what down. The first disclosure package in an importing file is usually thick and still incomplete, and the requests we make in the first weeks shape everything after.

Your name on the box

The Crown's central problem in a parcel case is that a shipping label is not knowledge. To convict you of importing, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you knew the substance was there, or were wilfully blind to an obvious risk, and that you had a measure of control over it. A box with your name on it, sitting on your porch, proves neither. People receive packages they did not order. Households share addresses. Units above shops and multi-tenant houses in Markham collect mail for people who moved out a year ago, and sometimes an address is used precisely because the person who lives there suspects nothing.

That is why the minutes around the delivery become the spine of the evidence. Did you sign? Did you open it? What did you say at the door, and what did you blurt in the cruiser? Whose phone ordered the shipment, whose account paid for it, and whose messages talk about a package coming? Investigators structure controlled deliveries to manufacture exactly this evidence, and the single most damaging exhibit in most files is something the accused said in the first ten minutes. You are entitled to counsel the moment you are detained. Use that right, say nothing, and let the label stay what it is: a label.

The flip side matters too. Where the Crown does have messages, payments and a controlled pickup, the knowledge fight narrows and the file becomes about role, quantity and sentence. An honest assessment of which case you are in, early, is worth more than optimism. If a package you were not expecting shows up and something about it feels wrong, do not open it, do not pass it along, and do not start messaging people about it. Get legal advice the same day.

The files behind these charges

Strip the case names away and York Region importing files repeat a small number of shapes. The parcel case: a courier box from overseas, flagged upstream, delivered to a house in Milliken or a condo mailroom on Highway 7, with the argument built entirely around who expected it. The freight case: a consignment moving through a brokerage or a warehouse, where paperwork, not fingerprints, decides who controlled the load. The account case: no drugs in your hands at all, but your name on the order, the payment or the delivery instructions, and the Crown asking a jury to read intent off a screen. The favour case: a package accepted for a cousin, a tenant, a friend of a friend, which is where wilful blindness gets argued hardest and where honest people get hurt worst by helpful answers at the door.

Each shape has its own pressure point. Parcel cases live and die on knowledge. Freight cases turn on control and authorization. Account cases rise or fall on who actually used the device. Favour cases are won by keeping the story straight and unspoken until counsel has the disclosure. What none of them reward is improvisation in the first hour, which is exactly what the investigation is designed to produce.

Charged before anything leaves Canada

Exporting has its own tripwire. Under section 6(2), possessing a substance for the purpose of exporting it is a complete offence with the same penalty ladder as importing, so a file can be built entirely inside Canada: outbound freight staged in a warehouse, parcels dropped at a shipping counter, a suitcase packed for a flight that never boards. The Crown does not need the substance to cross anything; it needs your possession plus the export purpose.

These allegations overlap heavily with possession for the purpose of trafficking, and the same seizure sometimes produces both theories, s.6(2) and s.5(2), argued in the alternative. The battlegrounds are familiar: knowledge, control, and whose purpose the packaging actually proves. The trafficking side of that fight has its own guide at our Markham drug trafficking page, and where the Crown alleges commerce at scale across Ontario, our Ontario drug trafficking page maps that terrain.

The four things the Crown must prove

Strip an importing prosecution to its frame and there are four load-bearing beams. One: the thing is a controlled substance, proven through analysis and certificates, not assumption. Two: it crossed into Canada, or was leaving, or was possessed for the purpose of exporting; the movement element sounds automatic in a parcel case but still has to be established with records rather than inference. Three: you knew the substance was there, or deliberately avoided finding out; suspicion is not knowledge, and nervousness at the door is not wilful blindness. Four: you had a measure of control, an ability to say what happened to the thing, which is where roommates, shared mailrooms and borrowed addresses complicate the Crown's story.

Each beam can be attacked separately, and the whole structure needs all four. A file with airtight movement records and a weak knowledge case fails. A file with damning messages but a broken continuity chain fails differently. The first job in every retainer is mapping which beam is weakest on the disclosure, then loading the fight there. And running underneath all of it is the carve-out in the section itself: except as authorized under the regulations. Licensed actors move controlled substances across the border lawfully every day, which is why the paperwork about who was authorized to do what is part of the defence review, not an afterthought.

The paper the Crown must produce

Importing files are paper cases, and the paper is where they crack. Before anyone talks about a plea, we want the authorization behind every step of the operation: what legal authority supported the examination of the shipment, what warrant or order covered the monitored delivery and any device installed with it, and what the affiant swore to get it. Warrant applications get the Morelli treatment, stripping out overstatement and asking whether what honestly remains could still justify what was done. Stinchcombe entitles the defence to disclosure of the investigative file, and in a multi-agency case that means chasing records across every desk the parcel crossed.

Then the substance itself. Continuity from the first examination to the laboratory has to hold: who opened the package, who resealed and repackaged it, how the exhibits were weighed, stored and transferred, and whether the certificates of analysis actually connect what was tested to what was charged. Breaks in that chain are not technicalities; they are reasonable doubt about what the thing even was.

And where the investigation cut a Charter corner, the detention, the statements taken before counsel, the searches that ran past their authority, Grant supplies the framework for excluding what was found. In a case built entirely on a monitored object and the moments around its delivery, exclusion decisions are usually case decisions.

Bail with the onus reversed

Importing or exporting a Schedule I or II substance is punishable by life, and that places it in the reverse-onus bail category under section 515(6)(d) of the Criminal Code. At the hearing it is not the Crown explaining why you should stay in custody; it is you showing cause why detention is not justified. For a Markham file that hearing, and any bail review after it, happens at the Newmarket courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West, the single building that holds York Region's bail list, its Ontario Court of Justice trial courts and its Superior Court of Justice.

Winning a reverse-onus hearing is a planning exercise. Sureties with real supervision to offer and something to lose. A residence the court can accept, with the people in it ready to answer questions. Reporting terms, travel document surrender, and workable conditions around phones and devices in a case that is all about parcels and messages. We build that plan in the first days, because the difference between a strong plan and a thin one is usually the difference between preparing your defence at home and preparing it from a range unit.

Election, the prelim and the 30-month clock

A Markham importing charge starts in the Ontario Court of Justice at Newmarket, but a life-maximum count opens two doors most charges do not: you may request a preliminary inquiry, and you may elect trial in the Superior Court of Justice, which sits in the same building. The prelim matters in parcel cases. It forces officers who wrote confident reports to answer questions under oath about seams in the operation, and it commits the Crown's witnesses to a record before trial.

Timing has teeth as well. Jordan sets presumptive ceilings from charge to the end of trial: 18 months in the provincial court, 30 months where the case proceeds in the Superior Court. Importing files are document-heavy, multi-agency and slow, which is exactly the kind of file that tests those ceilings, so we track the clock from the first appearance and put delay on the record as it accumulates. Throughout, the prosecutor is federal: the Public Prosecution Service of Canada carries CDSA prosecutions at Newmarket, and the defence deals with a Crown office that handles border files as a steady diet.

Sentencing an importing count: what actually moves the number

Once the minimums disappeared, sentencing became argument, and the argument runs on a handful of levers. Role is the biggest: the organizer who financed a shipment and the courier who carried one for a fee are sentenced on different scales, and proving which one you were is real work, done with records rather than adjectives. Quantity and substance matter next, fentanyl weighs heavier than anything else on the scale, and the schedule sets the ceiling the number moves under. Then the statutory aggravators in section 10 of the CDSA: carrying or using a weapon, violence or threats, involving a person under 18, and a prior drug record. Where an aggravating factor is present and the court still declines jail, it must explain why.

The mitigation side is just as structured. First offence, guilty plea timing, immigration jeopardy, family responsibility, and genuine rehabilitation all move numbers. Both the CDSA and the Criminal Code let a sentencing judge delay sentencing so an offender can complete a drug treatment court program approved by the Attorney General or a treatment program under section 720(2), and which program a York Region file can actually reach is something we confirm case by case before building a position on it. Where the fit sentence lands under two years, the conditional sentence conversation is live. Where it cannot, the fight is about how far above two years the number really needs to be. Either way, the hearing is prepared like a trial, because it is one.

If the arrest happened at the airport instead

Not every Markham resident charged with importing is charged in York Region. A traveller stopped at Toronto Pearson International Airport is typically prosecuted where the offence occurred, which often means the courts in Peel rather than Newmarket. The law is the same statute, the same penalty ladder and the same defence terrain; the courthouse, the Crown office and the local practices differ. Venue is not a footnote. It decides which Crown office holds the file, where your sureties must travel for a bail hearing, which courthouse your family sits in for months, and which local timelines the case moves on. We defend importing files in both York Region and the neighbouring court locations, and the first thing we confirm from your release papers is which building your case actually lives in.

What else rides on an importing charge

The sentence is not the only stake. For permanent residents and foreign nationals, a drug conviction of this gravity can carry immigration consequences severe enough to outweigh the criminal penalty itself, so tell your lawyer your status at the first meeting and before any resolution position is taken. Travel becomes complicated, and questions about crossing into the United States deserve specific advice rather than guesswork. Property is exposed too: vehicles and other things connected to the offence can be seized and pursued as offence-related property, cash gets restrained, and forfeiture runs on its own track beside the criminal counts. And a conviction for an offence in this family follows you through employment and volunteer screening for years. All of it belongs in the defence plan from day one, not discovered at the end. One caution about something you may have seen elsewhere on this site: the diversion-first framework and the record sequestration rules you may have read about on our possession pages belong to simple possession under section 4(1) only. They do not apply to importing or exporting counts, and planning around them here would be planning around law that does not cover you.

Why Kazandji Law for a York Region importing file

Importing prosecutions are the heaviest files in the drug ledger, run by federal prosecutors on evidence assembled by border and police agencies over months. Defending them takes appetite for paper, patience for disclosure fights and complete comfort in the Superior Court. Fadi Matthew Kazandji defends CDSA prosecutions across the Greater Toronto Area, and the firm runs the knowledge defence, the Charter attack and the bail and sentencing strategy as one plan rather than three.

We work from four offices: Thornhill at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, minutes up Yonge Street from Markham's west side; the head office at 180 John Street, Unit 320 in downtown Toronto; North York; and Oakville. If you are still matching your release papers to the right guide, start with our Markham drug offence overview, and for the downtown version of this charge see our Toronto drug import and export page.

Frequently asked questions about Markham importing and exporting charges

This page is general legal information for people facing drug importing and exporting allegations in Markham and York Region. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create a lawyer and client relationship. Statutes and penalties are stated as of July 2026 and can change. For advice about your own situation, call Kazandji Law at 647-588-3234.