The Crown must give you its entire case before you are asked to respond to it. Your disclosure package is not just paperwork. It is the foundation of your defence.
When you are charged with a criminal offence in Ontario, you have a constitutional right to receive full disclosure from the Crown before you enter a plea or make any election about how to proceed. This right, affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Stinchcombe, means the prosecution must give your lawyer every piece of relevant evidence it has gathered, whether it helps or hurts its case. Understanding what is in your disclosure package and how your lawyer uses it is essential to understanding your position.
What Is Included in Disclosure
A disclosure package for a typical criminal charge in Ontario contains several categories of material. The first is the police synopsis or occurrence report, which is the officer's written narrative of the alleged offence. This is usually the starting point for any analysis of the Crown's theory of the case. Second are the witness statements, including statements given by the complainant, bystanders, and any other witnesses police interviewed during the investigation.
The package also includes notes from all officers involved in the arrest and investigation. These officer notes are particularly important in assault cases, drug cases, and any matter where the conduct of police is in issue. Video evidence, including body-worn camera footage, surveillance recordings, and any recordings made by witnesses, is also included where it exists.
Forensic and Expert Evidence
In more serious charges, the disclosure package will include forensic reports. In drug cases, this means the certificate of analysis from Health Canada confirming the identity and quantity of the substance. In assault matters, it may include medical records or injury documentation. In fraud cases, disclosure can run to thousands of pages of financial records, transaction histories, and expert accounting analyses.
Your lawyer must read and analyze all of this material before advising you. Skipping this step is one of the most common ways accused persons end up with poor outcomes. The strength of the Crown's case, and the viability of any defence, almost always becomes clear only after a thorough review of disclosure.
Your Right to Complete Disclosure
Disclosure must be complete. The Crown cannot withhold relevant evidence, even if it is unhelpful to the prosecution. Where the Crown fails to disclose something relevant, your lawyer can bring an application asserting a breach of section 7 of the Charter and seek a remedy, which can include a stay of proceedings in serious cases.
Third-party records, including private communications, therapy records, and social media accounts, require a separate application under sections 278.1 to 278.9 of the Criminal Code. Your lawyer will assess whether such records exist and whether they are likely to be relevant to your defence.
How Defence Lawyers Use Disclosure
A skilled defence lawyer reads disclosure strategically. The goal is not just to understand the Crown's case, but to identify inconsistencies, gaps in the evidence, Charter violations, and weaknesses in witness credibility. In many cases, a thorough review of disclosure reveals grounds for negotiating a withdrawal, pursuing a section 24(2) Charter remedy to exclude evidence, or preparing targeted cross-examination of Crown witnesses at trial.
The ultimate guide to criminal trials in Ontario explains how disclosure review shapes every stage of the litigation. Whether your case resolves at first appearance or proceeds to a jury trial, disclosure is the map that guides every decision.
For questions about your specific situation after being charged, the guide to what to do after being charged provides a practical overview of the steps you should take immediately.
Section 278.1 of the Criminal Code sets out the legal framework governing production and disclosure of private records in sexual offence proceedings, one of the most heavily litigated areas of disclosure law.