The following are some vignettes of what life in Canada was like before the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. I have been practicing long enough to have personal experience of pre-Charter defence and its tactics. This page will focus particularly on what the practice of criminal law was like both in recent and ancient past...

If you’re under the impression that it’s easy to navigate through the criminal justice process, here is a bit of insight. Any case other than the simplest matters usually require that a judicial pre-trial conference by conducted to either attempt to resolve the charge or discuss the myriad of legal issues that may arise, in order to prepare the case for trial and come to a reasonable estimate of the trial time required...

The Prosecutor, in Canada, is called a Crown Attorney. The job of a Crown Attorney is to prosecute the criminal charges laid by police officers. This is an adversarial process. The Crown tries to prove you committed a criminal offence, and as the defence attorney, I try to prevent that, on your behalf. The Crown is the state’s lawyer, and I am your lawyer. It is the state against you. Note that the victim/complainant does not have a lawyer. The role of the victim in this process is that of a witness....

What’s the difference? Possession of marijuana is currently a criminal offence which means if you’re convicted of this offence you will have a criminal record for drug possession. If possession of marijuana is decriminalized it will remain an offence but will be moved from a criminal offence to a regulatory offence...

For most matters, other than the most serious and complicated matters when we can’t, on the basis of our experience, reasonably estimate the amount of work to be done to reach a resolution of the charges, prefer to quote an all inclusive block fee for all services we need to provide....

Suppose you have had a few beers — maybe a few too many — and you remember that you left your car in the driveway. You grab your keys, stumble to the car, start it, and drive it into the garage. As you are staggering out of the garage, a police officer who happens to be driving past your house notices that you are having difficulty walking in a straight line...

When it comes to criminals we tend to have an “us and them” attitude. We consider a class of people, very different than us, who are the criminals and then there are the rest of us. Even when we are personally involved in the criminal justice system as alleged criminals we don’t think of ourselves as one of “them”...

When I get a call from a person under arrest at a police station I ALWAYS advise them NOT to give a statement to the police. I often later find that my advice was not taken and that person gave a statement to the police that was audio/video recorded. Sometimes the reason given is that the person thought they would look guilty if they refused to give a statement, often because the person was not guilty and wanted to convince the police of their innocence or sometimes because the person thought they could out-smart the police....

August 3, 2010 heralded some of the most significant changes to the way drinking and driving offences are dealt with that we’ve seen in a long time. We have seen and continue to see the federal government and the government of Ontario make changes to the law as part of their “get tough on crime” approach which had the effect of restricting the defences that an accused person could raise at trial and broadening the scope of drinking and driving offences...