What Clients Deserve (and rarely get) - Bail

As a criminal defence lawyer in Ontario, I care deeply about our justice system. After three years in the trenches, I’ve seen enough to share an honest, no-holds-barred take on what clients deserve - and how rarely they actually get it. Buckle up for some candor and a bit of wit from my ADHD-fueled brain as we tour the state of justice in Ontario.

Bail: Presumed Innocent, Delayed in Custody

Clients deserve the benefit of the doubt and a fair shot at bail. In theory, our Charter gives everyone the right not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause. In reality, “reasonable” often flies out the window. Too often I’ve watched clients spend days (even weeks) in custody just waiting for a bail hearing. There’s a well-documented “culture of adjournment” in bail courts - the default is to postpone rather than decide, meaning another night on a jail bunk for the accused. Despite court rulings condemning these systemic delays, the problem remains entrenched. Presumed innocent? Sure - tell that to someone who’s presumed innocent while sleeping on a jail floor for a week.

Government leaders paint a very different picture of bail.  If you listen to Ontario’s Premier, the problem is “catch-and-release” or violent offenders getting out days after arrest, endangering our communities . In April 2025 the province even rolled out a plan to “strengthen bail” by beefing up bail enforcement teams. The Premier thundered “enough is enough” and vowed to keep repeat offenders behind bars . Ottawa got the message: by late 2023, the federal government passed new legislation (former Bill C-48) tightening Canada’s bail regime, including more “reverse onus” situations where certain accused must justify why they should be released.

Here’s the thing: My clients deserve safety and the public deserves safety – but they also deserve fairness. The loud calls for tougher bail often ignore a more uncomfortable truth: our bail system isn’t a revolving door of leniency; it’s a clogged bottleneck of over-detention.

Community advocates have pointed out that the real crisis in Canada’s bail system is “over-detention and over-criminalization, not leniency.”  In fact, nearly 79% of people in Ontario jails are in pre-trial detention. In other words, four out of five inmates haven’t been convicted of anything yet, they’re just waiting for bail or trial . That figure is staggering, and it means the constitutional right to a timely bail hearing is routinely violated.

Meanwhile, strict bail conditions often set clients up to fail. I’ve had homeless clients released on bail with orders that would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic – like a curfew and regular check-ins when the person doesn’t even have a phone or stable housing.

Clients deserve a bail system that recognizes human limits and social realities. What they get is a minefield of conditions that can be unrelated to public safety or even impossible to follow – the kind that can turn a missed bus into a breach. No wonder the Supreme Court warned in 2020 that excessive bail terms and charge-stacking for minor breaches were spinning vulnerable people into a “revolving door” of justice.

Jails: The Revolving Door

If bail falls through, clients land in our provincial jails – and deserve at least humane conditions while they await justice. This is where I’d love to tell you “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.” But I’m a terrible liar. The conditions in many Ontario detention centres are dire, and that’s putting it politely. Overcrowding? Check. Understaffing leading to constant lockdowns? Check. A lack of mental health supports so severe that solitary confinement (now rebranded as “structured intervention units”) gets misused to warehouse people in crisis? Check, unfortunately.

Judges have started to call out what’s happening. In one blistering decision, an Ontario judge observed that the province’s chronic failure to fix appalling jail conditions “can no longer be excused as a temporary problem”. The court found it appears to be “a deliberate policy choice to treat offenders in an inhumane fashion” to save money, ignoring repeated judicial warnings . In fact, the judge said the “inhumane conditions” at Toronto South Detention Centre (one of our largest jails) amount to “deliberate state misconduct.” Let that sink in: the way we house presumed innocent people has been compared to intentional misconduct by the state.

What does that look like on the ground? Because of guard shortages or other “operational issues,” entire units get locked in their cells for days on end. No showers, no phone calls to family or lawyers, lights on 24/7, two (sometimes three) people in a tiny cell losing their minds with boredom and anxiety.

There’s actually a class-action lawsuit in Ontario arguing that excessive lockdowns violate prisoners’ rights as cruel and unusual punishment . For clients, though, this isn’t news – it’s daily life on remand. They deserve to be held in safe, sanitary conditions that aim to rehabilitate or at least humanely contain. Instead, they get stress, violence, and neglect. Many emerge from pre-trial custody in worse shape than when they went in.

Ironically, the province’s answer to jail chaos has often been to build new jails (with more beds to fill) rather than fund community supports or bail programs that would keep people out of those jails. “Public safety” gets cited to justify all manner of crackdowns, but what about the safety of the human beings inside these institutions? I’ve had clients tell me they’d rather plead guilty to anything just to get out of the hellhole of pre-trial detention and into a federal prison where at least they might get outdoor time and programming. That’s despair talking – and it’s a sign of a system that normalizes conditions a civilized society should find outrageous.

Clients. Deserve. Better.