M Sodhi

The defendant, Waqas Qureshi, brought an application under section 11(b) of the Charter to stay gun charges due to unreasonable delay.

The court had previously dismissed this application.

Following the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Hanan, 2023 SCC 12, the court revisited its earlier ruling regarding the attribution of delay caused by defence unavailability for trial dates.

The court affirmed its original dismissal, concluding that Hanan did not alter its finding that the defence's unavailability was the sole and direct cause of the delay in this specific period.

The defendant, Waqas Qureshi, brought an application for a stay of proceedings under section 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, alleging unreasonable delay.

The total delay from charge to anticipated end of trial was 680 days, exceeding the 18-month presumptive ceiling for the Ontario Court of Justice.

The Crown sought to deduct two periods of defence delay: 100 days for a delay in setting a Judicial Pre-Trial (JPT) and 144 days for defence counsel's unavailability for a rescheduled trial date.

The court found the JPT delay was not attributable to the defence due to Crown disclosure issues.

However, the court determined that the 144-day period of defence unavailability was deductible, as the offered trial dates were not "too soon" to allow for preparation.

With this deduction, the net delay was 536 days, falling below the presumptive ceiling of 549 days.

Consequently, the application for a stay of proceedings was dismissed.

The defendant brought an application to stay proceedings on two counts of fraud over on the grounds of abuse of process and issue estoppel.

The Crown sought to proceed on two surviving counts from an eight-count information after the court had stayed a consolidated single-count information on section 11(b) Charter grounds (trial within a reasonable time).

The court rejected both the issue estoppel argument and the abuse of process argument, finding no prejudice to the accused's fair trial rights and no conduct offensive to societal notions of fair play.

The application to stay was dismissed.

The defendant brought a motion to stay proceedings on a charge of defrauding the public (offence dates 2013-2018), alleging a violation of his Charter right to trial within a reasonable time under section 11(b).

The Crown and defence disagreed on the calculation of net delay.

The court determined that the net delay was 19 months 28 days, exceeding the presumptive ceiling of 18 months.

The Crown presented no exceptional circumstances to justify the extension.

The court granted the stay of proceedings on the consolidated count and addressed the status of remaining multi-count informations.