Toronto Home Invasion Lawyers

Home › Criminal Defence › Toronto Home Invasion Lawyers

Home invasion is a headline word, not a Criminal Code charge. What lands on a Toronto indictment is a stack of counts: break and enter of a dwelling-house, usually robbery, sometimes forcible confinement, with section 348.1 waiting at sentencing to turn the occupied home into a mandatory aggravating factor. Each count in that stack has its own elements, its own maximum and its own weak points, and understanding how the stack is built is the first step to taking it apart. This page explains that architecture. Our Toronto break and enter page covers the property tier of the same offence, and our Toronto robbery page covers the taking-by-violence side.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Serving Toronto. Updated July 2026.

The charges that actually appear on the indictment

Search the Criminal Code for home invasion and you will not find an offence by that name. Police use the phrase, reporters use it, and Crown synopses sometimes lead with it, but what a person actually faces in a Toronto courtroom is a set of separate charges laid over one address and one night. The stacking is deliberate. Each count captures a different slice of the allegation, and together they raise the stakes at every stage, from the first bail decision to the last sentencing submission.

The core of the stack is nearly always break and enter of a dwelling-house under section 348(1)(d), a straight indictable offence with a maximum of life imprisonment. Where the Crown alleges property was taken by violence or threats of violence, robbery joins it. Where occupants were held, moved or tied, forcible confinement appears. And where a gun is said to have been used, section 85 adds a count whose sentence must run consecutively to the rest if it sticks.

Two things follow. First, the real exposure is driven by the two life-maximum counts, not by the phrase the file arrived with. Second, every count must be proven on its own elements, against each accused separately. The Crown does not get to treat the stack as a package, and a defence should never answer it as one. That sounds obvious, but it decides more of these prosecutions than any single legal argument, because a stack that looks overwhelming as a whole is usually uneven once you test it joint by joint.

One more feature of the stack deserves attention before the elements do: it rarely names a single person. These indictments usually charge two, three or four people together, on the theory that everyone present shared the plan. Party liability is real law, but it is not automatic, and the question of what each individual actually did, agreed to or foresaw runs through every count that follows. Keep that in mind while you read, because the answer is rarely the same for everyone alleged to have been there, and the strongest defence position is often built on exactly that difference.

What section 348.1 adds, and what it does not

Section 348.1 is the provision everyone is actually talking about when they say home invasion, and it is widely misunderstood. It is not an offence. Nobody is charged with it, it never appears as a count, and no jury returns a verdict on it. It is a sentencing direction: where a person is convicted of one of the listed offences committed in relation to a dwelling-house, the court must treat a specific combination of facts as an aggravating circumstance when it passes sentence.

That combination has four working parts, and each of them can be contested:

• A conviction on a listed offence. The list covers break and enter, robbery, forcible confinement, extortion and offences involving the theft of a firearm, each in relation to a dwelling-house. No conviction, no rider.
• Occupation. The dwelling-house was occupied at the time of the offence. Somebody was home.
• Knowledge or recklessness. The person knew the home was occupied, or was reckless about whether it was.
• Violence. The person used violence or threats of violence, and the provision reaches threats against property as well as against people.

What the provision does not do matters just as much. It creates no new charge. It raises no maximum, because break and enter of a home and robbery already carry life. And it imposes no minimum sentence. What it removes is the sentencing judge's ability to treat the occupied-home context as neutral. If the elements are made out, the judge is required to weigh them against the offender.

When a firearm is alleged: minimums, stacking and the onus

A gun changes the arithmetic of a home invasion file in three distinct ways, and it pays to be precise about each of them, because this is the corner of the law where out-of-date information circulates most.

First, the minimums. Robbery carries a mandatory minimum of five years for a first offence and seven for a subsequent one only where a restricted or prohibited firearm is used, or where any firearm is used in connection with a criminal organization. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that five-year minimum in Hilbach in 2023, so it is a live number, not a technicality. But Parliament repealed the former four-year minimum for other firearms in 2022 through Bill C-5. A robbery alleged with an ordinary long gun no longer carries a mandatory minimum, though the maximum remains life. Which category the alleged firearm falls into is therefore not a detail. It can be the difference between a mandatory penitentiary floor and fully open sentencing.

Second, the stacking. Using a firearm or an imitation firearm in the commission of an indictable offence is its own count under section 85, with a maximum of 14 years and no minimum in the current text. What makes it heavy is the statutory direction that its sentence be served consecutively to the sentence for the underlying offence. Imitations count too. A replica pistol produces the same section 85 exposure as a real one, because the fear it creates in an occupied house is the same.

Third, the bail posture. Where a firearm is alleged in a robbery, the onus at the bail hearing reverses and it becomes the accused's job to show why release is justified. That single allegation reshapes the first week of the case. We cover how the Crown chooses among the gun counts themselves on our Toronto firearms offence page, and the robbery minimums in more depth on the Toronto robbery page.

The house looked empty: contesting occupation and recklessness

The most distinctive battleground in these files is the occupation element. Section 348.1 needs an occupied home and a person who knew that or was reckless about it. Real cases are messier than the headline suggests, and the mess is where the defence works.

Think about how the evidence actually runs. Entries alleged to be home invasions tend to happen at night, when lights are off and cars may or may not be in the driveway. Crews that break into houses for property deliberately pick homes that look vacant, and evidence of that selection, scouting for darkened houses, knocking first, entering through an unoccupied basement, cuts directly against the claim that anyone knew people were inside. Wrong-address and wrong-unit cases exist too, especially in a city of stacked condo units, subdivided houses and basement apartments, and a person who honestly believed they were entering a different place has answers on intent that reach well beyond the rider.

The violence element has its own seams. Violence or threats must actually be proven, and in multi-count indictments the Crown sometimes proves that somebody used force without proving who. Where the case is built on masked figures and grainy footage, identity and the violence element blur together, and both have to be tested count by count and accused by accused.

None of this is an argument that the allegation is minor. It is a reminder that the aggravating rider is not self-proving. Judges apply it on evidence, not on the label the police gave the file, and the occupation element in particular fails more often than people assume once the timeline is rebuilt hour by hour.

Held for bail: what a release plan for this allegation takes

People charged after an alleged entry into an occupied home are rarely released at the division. Expect the police to hold for a hearing, and expect that hearing to run at the Toronto Regional Bail Centre at 2201 Finch Avenue West, which conducts Toronto's adult bail hearings. First appearances on the charges themselves proceed at the Ontario Court of Justice at 10 Armoury Street, but bail does not happen there, and families waste precious hours at the wrong building often enough that it is worth saying plainly.

The legal posture matters. On most home invasion stacks the Crown bears the onus of showing why detention is justified. That onus reverses in specific situations: where a firearm is alleged in the robbery, where the accused was already on release for another indictable matter, and where the allegation involves a firearm possessed in breach of an existing weapons prohibition. And even where the onus stays with the Crown, an allegation of violence inside somebody's home presses hard on the public-confidence ground for detention, so the court will want far more than a promise to behave.

A release plan for an allegation this serious has to be built as if it will be attacked, because it will be. That means sureties who can genuinely supervise, and who can explain from the witness box exactly how. It means a residence the court can verify, terms that answer the allegation directly, including no-contact and no-go conditions, and often a meaningful financial pledge. It usually means dealing with curfews or house rules before the court proposes them. Assembling all of that in the hours after arrest rather than the weeks after is one of the most valuable things counsel does on these files. Our Toronto bail lawyers page walks through the hearing itself, the grounds of detention and the review routes if the first decision goes badly.

If the first decision goes against you, that is not the end of the road. A detention order can be reviewed in the Superior Court on proper material, and a genuine change in circumstances, stronger sureties, a verified residence, new disclosure that weakens the identification, can reopen the question. Plans improve and hearings get revisited. What cannot be recovered is the time spent in custody waiting for somebody to start that work.

Election and the preliminary inquiry: the long route to a jury

Because the core counts are straight indictable with life maximums, the accused chooses the trial court: the Ontario Court of Justice, the Superior Court of Justice before a judge alone, or the Superior Court before a judge and jury. And because the counts are punishable by 14 years or more, a preliminary inquiry is available on a Superior Court election. That is a meaningful procedural asset. A preliminary inquiry lets the defence hear and test the central witnesses under oath before trial, pin down identification evidence while it is fresh, and see how the occupation and violence elements actually come out of people's mouths rather than out of a police synopsis.

It has limits. A preliminary inquiry adds time, it shows the Crown part of the cross-examination, and committal to stand trial is a low bar, so its point is discovery and locking witnesses to a record, not an early acquittal. Whether to elect up is a strategy decision made file by file, driven by the identification evidence, the number of accused, the state of disclosure and the client's tolerance for a longer road.

Geographically the case moves across the city as it matures: appearances and judicial pretrials downtown at 10 Armoury Street, then trial at 361 University Avenue if a jury is elected. The constitutional clock runs the whole time, 18 months to trial in the provincial court and 30 months in the Superior Court under Jordan, and multi-accused files are exactly the kind where delay arguments later turn on decisions made in the first months.

Taking the stack apart, count by count

A home invasion prosecution is a structure, and structures come apart joint by joint rather than all at once.

Identity comes first. Most of these entries involve covered faces, so the Crown's case is usually circumstantial: cell tower and GPS data, doorbell and lobby footage from surrounding addresses, footwear impressions, DNA on gloves or clothing left behind, and sometimes the co-operation of people with their own exposure. Every one of those strands has known failure modes. Footage gets challenged on quality, lighting and continuity. Phone data proves where a phone was, not who was holding it. Witnesses with deals get cross-examined on the deals.

The rider elements come second. Occupation, knowledge, recklessness and the violence element each get tested the way the earlier sections describe, separately for each accused, because a driver who never entered the house is not automatically fixed with what happened inside it.

The counts get separated, not lumped. Robbery needs a taking by violence or threats. Confinement needs restraint that is more than momentary. The break and enter count needs the entry and the intent. It is common for part of a stack to fail while another part survives, and included offences within the counts create resolution room that a package view hides. Where several people are tried together, applications about severance and about which evidence reaches which accused become part of the work, always shaped to the facts of the file.

The Charter runs underneath all of it. Entries into suspects' homes, phone seizures, production orders for location data and statements taken in the first hours all get reviewed. Serious counts do not loosen the rules of search and seizure. If anything, courts look harder at state conduct when the stakes are this high.

And in multi-accused files, remember that defences are not shared. One person’s alibi is another person’s problem, disclosure lands unevenly, and the order in which counsel move can matter. Those dynamics get managed deliberately from the start rather than discovered at trial, which is one more reason these files reward early and senior attention over a wait-and-see approach.

If convictions land: what the sentencing judge starts from

Honesty about exposure is part of the job, so here it is without varnish. A conviction for break and enter of a dwelling-house carries a maximum of life. So does robbery. Section 348.1 then obliges the judge to treat the occupied home, the knowledge of occupation and the violence as aggravating within those ceilings. Where a restricted or prohibited firearm was used in the robbery, a five-year minimum applies, seven on a repeat, and a section 85 conviction adds consecutive time on top of the sentence for the main offence.

Custody is not the whole picture. A finding that violence was used, threatened or attempted brings a mandatory weapons prohibition under section 109, at least ten years for non-restricted firearms and life for restricted or prohibited weapons, with life across the board on a repeat. Forfeiture of seized items typically follows, and a conviction of this kind carries record and travel consequences that outlast any sentence by decades.

What we will not do is quote a sentencing range on a webpage. Outcomes in this area are intensely fact-driven: the level of violence, the presence of children, planning and sophistication, criminal record, the role each accused played, Gladue factors, immigration collateral and rehabilitation evidence all move the number, sometimes dramatically. Anyone who promises a result from a paragraph of facts is selling something. The statute sets the frame. The file sets the outcome.

Not every file keeps its label: resolutions and lesser counts

Some of these prosecutions end far smaller than they began. Not because anyone waves the seriousness away, but because the stack depends on elements that fail in predictable places. When the occupation evidence collapses, the rider goes with it, and a file the Crown opened as a home invasion becomes a property break and enter, which is a different world at sentencing and is covered on our Toronto break and enter page. When the violence cannot be tied to a particular accused, robbery and confinement counts weaken while the entry count stands, or the reverse. When identification is the problem, the entire structure is in issue at once.

Resolution is not a single event either. Counts resolve separately, included offences get used, and Crown positions move as disclosure fills in. The defence's leverage is almost always built earlier than people expect: preservation letters for footage in the first weeks, early retention of experts where impressions or DNA matter, and a bail record that shows months of clean compliance. We will not promise a withdrawal or a particular plea on this page, and you should be wary of anyone who does. The honest statement is that these files move when the evidence is made to show its weak points, and that a meaningful share of them finally land in the property tier rather than the violent one.

Charges that travel with these files

Two neighbours of the home invasion stack deserve a mention. Extortion under section 346 sits on the same section 348.1 list, and it appears where the allegation is that occupants were forced to do something rather than simply robbed: hand over a PIN, open a safe, transfer money. It carries its own life maximum and its own elements, and it changes the shape of the defence when it appears.

Break and enter to steal a firearm under section 98 is the other one. It matters twice over: it sits on the home invasion list, and it is among the offences that reverse the bail onus on their own. Where the theory is that a home was entered for its guns, the file takes on a firearms character from the first appearance, which is exactly the ground covered on our Ontario weapons offence page.

And for anyone who is not a Canadian citizen, every count in the stack raises immigration questions. Findings of serious criminality can affect permanent residents and foreign nationals independently of the sentence imposed, so resolution design on these files brings in immigration advice early rather than after the fact. The same logic applies to records: how a file resolves determines what follows you, and that gets thought through at the start, not the end.

Why Kazandji Law for a home invasion allegation

Fadi Matthew Kazandji is the founding partner of Kazandji Law and defends serious violent-entry allegations across the Greater Toronto Area. Files like these reward preparation over posture: the identity evidence has to be dissected, the rider elements have to be contested from day one, and the bail plan has to survive a hard hearing in front of a skeptical court. That is the standard we run at, on every file.

• Toronto head office, 180 John Street, Unit 320, minutes from the courthouse at 10 Armoury Street where these prosecutions begin.
• Thornhill office, 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, serving Markham and York Region. York-side files have their own page: Markham home invasion lawyer.
• North York and Oakville offices for clients across the rest of the GTA.

Consultations are free and the phone is answered around the clock. Results from past defences are collected on our success stories page. When the word on the file is home invasion, the time to call is before your first court date, not after it.

This page is legal information for people facing home invasion allegations in Toronto, not legal advice about any specific case. Criminal Code provisions are summarized as of the July 2026 update of this page, and every file turns on its own facts. For advice about your situation, contact Kazandji Law for a free consultation at 647-588-3234.