The ReeveLaw Blog

As Doug Ford targets courts over bail, Zameer case, Ontario chief justice warns of attacks that ‘undermine the legitimacy of the judiciary’

By Jacques Gallant of The Star

Ontario’s top judge is warning that attacks on the justice system risk eroding the rule of law and ultimately causing society to fall into disorder, at a time when the courts are a frequent target of criticism from police and politicians. 

“Leaders in all sectors of society — government, law enforcement, media, and civic institutions — share a responsibility to uphold respect for the judicial process, even when they disagree with particular outcomes,” Chief Justice Michael Tulloch said in a speech delivered last week at the Truscott Lecture in Justice at the University of Guelph.

The erosion of the rule of law rarely happens suddenly, the chief justice said.

“It happens gradually — through repeated questioning of institutional legitimacy, through the normalization of distrust, and through the suggestion that legal outcomes are determined by politics rather than by law.”

Premier Doug Ford, who has long taken the view that jurists are releasing too many people on bail, recently called for those hearings to be live-streamed. “Everyone is held accountable, including our judges,” Ford said in March.

He also echoed the calls from the Toronto Police Association that the judge who presided over the trial of Umar Zameer should apologize for concluding, based on the evidence before her, that three officers had colluded and lied in their testimony. An OPP report found otherwise last month, though it has been widely criticized as a whitewash. 

“Maybe the judge should apologize for accusing them of everything under the sun,” Ford said.The Ontario government has also said it wants to have a role in the selection of federally-appointed judges to higher courts, while Ford attracted much criticism in 2024 when two of his ex-staffers were placed on the selection committee for provincial court judges, and the premier then declared he wanted to appoint “like-minded judges” who would hand down longer sentences. Multiple legal organizations expressed concern that the independence of the judiciary was under attack. 

Tulloch’s remarks represent a rare public rebuke by the judicial branch, although he doesn’t refer to specific incidents. He said that judicial independence “is not a privilege granted to judges for their own benefit,” but rather a constitutional protection for the public.

“It exists so that every person who appears before a court can be confident that their case will be decided according to the law and the evidence — not according to political pressure, institutional interests, or public sentiment,” he said.

“When public discourse suggests that judges are acting out of political motives rather than applying the law, or when institutions imply that courts are obstacles to justice rather than guardians of it, or when commentators imply that fair processes and adversarial testing conceal guilt instead of uncovering truth, the consequences can extend far beyond a single case,” Tulloch said.

An accused person has an absolute right to remain silent. This is a foundational right enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Everyone has this right. In this case this Superior Court Judge decided that because an accused person denied one specific allegation, he must have admitted the rest of the allegations. Our Court of Appeal had to set the Judge straight.

“[4] We conclude that the trial judge erred by treating the appellant’s silence in his police statement as a “tacit admission” of guilt to the offences that he did not explicitly deny. The trial judge’s error was foundational because it materially affected her assessment of the appellant’s testimony, leading her to reject it, and of the complainant’s testimony, by bolstering it. Moreover, her finding of the appellant’s “tacit admission” of guilt served as one of the principal bases for her finding of the appellant’s guilt on the charges. We set aside the convictions and order a new trial. It is unnecessary to consider the sentence appeal.

[14] An accused’s right to silence in the face of police questioning is fundamental under the common law and has received “Charter benediction” under s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: R. v. Turcotte, 2005 SCC 50, [2005] 2 S.C.R. 519, at paras. 41-42. The choice to remain completely silent, or to impart some but not all information, can never be used as evidence of guilt: Turcotte, at paras. 44-46, 52.

[20] It is clear from her reasons reproduced above that the trial judge accepted the trial Crown’s submission that, in denying one allegation, the appellant’s silence regarding the other allegations and the text amounted to admissions. The inference suggested by the Crown amounted to an impermissible inference of guilt from silence. That is especially so because the appellant asserted his right to silence more than once during the interview. The trial judge relied on these “tacit admissions” as foundational support for her findings of guilt against the appellant with respect to the charges for which he was convicted.

[22] As such, the trial judge erred by using the appellant’s silence to infer guilt. A new trial is required.

https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2026/2026onca116/2026onca116.html

By Jacques Gallant of The Star
A veteran Crown attorney is being accused of berating a Toronto police officer while suggesting he should have given “false evidence” on the stand.

The explosive allegation involves a tense encounter between prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg and Const. Edin Hasanbasic in January, during which she admonished the officer in the hallway of the Toronto provincial courthouse at 10 Armoury St. — within earshot of several witnesses — about his testimony at the trial of a man accused of intentionally hitting another officer with a motorcycle.

Hasanbasic, who was called as a witness by the defence, had just told the court it didn’t look like a head-on collision and that the other officer “seemed like he was fine” and was not seriously injured; it was testimony that risked hurting the Crown’s case.

In his notes about the hallway encounter, Hasanbasic wrote that the prosecutor was yelling and swearing about his testimony.
He wrote that he told Goldenberg, “What am I supposed to do? Lie?”
“She responded with, ‘We protect our own,’” he wrote.

Goldenberg, a prosecutor of 22 years whose husband is a police officer, has acknowledged she confronted Hasanbasic, but adamantly denies saying those words — “Police officers are not my own, and it is not my job to protect them.”

He wrote that Goldenberg said her husband is a cop, and twice told him, “we protect our own,” including after he asked if he was supposed to lie. He then returned to a meeting room, telling (defence lawyer) Jamshidi and another officer, “The Crown just tore me a new one for being honest.”

He then overheard her say: “You’re a young copper and you have many years ahead of you. If you continue this way, you won’t have a lengthy or easy career.”

When Goldenberg took the stand (on a stay application), it was the second time this month that the longtime Crown attorney found herself in the witness box — she also testified just last week as the victim in an antisemitic threat trial, in which the accused woman was convicted.

While Hasanbasic testified that Young wasn’t seriously injured, since he finished his shift, Goldenberg said she told him in the hallway that’s because Young is a “38-year copper and that’s what they do,” going on to say that her husband is a “37-year copper” and would have also completed his shift.

Goldenberg became emotional on the stand, explaining that after raising the sergeant’s injury to Hasanbasic, she suddenly pictured her husband, who had had heart surgery a few years earlier, lying on a hospital bed. She said she also told Hasanbasic that she was becoming emotional, and ended the conversation by walking to the elevator.

By Brendan Kennedy of The Star:
Justice Clayton Conlan made clear that his decision to throw out first-degree murder charges because of the abuse the accused suffered while awaiting trial at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex was about much more than the violent retribution they and nearly 200 other inmates endured.

That treatment over two days in December 2023 was “akin to torture,” Conlan wrote. But the judge’s 113-page ruling suggests he likely would not have granted the stay if jail officials — from high-ranking administrators to rank-and-file guards — hadn’t also tried to cover up what happened, and then further lied about it in court.
Thirty Maplehurst witnesses testified over weeks of pre-trial hearings. Conlan found most of them gave untruthful, evasive or “blatantly incorrect or false testimony.”

The deceit ranged from serious attempts to conceal what happened, to absurd, easily disprovable lies that left the judge stunned. Conlan rejected all of it, finding the search was conducted “for one reason and one reason only. It was done for vengeance.”

Conlan found management’s requests to have occurrence reports prepared four months later were part of an “after-the-fact effort … to coverup the real reason for the ICIT activation.”

Several Maplehurst correctional officers lied in court about things that were obviously disprovable and with explanations Conlan found to be absurd.

Justice Conlan was blunt in his assessment of their credibility. “They lied, under oath, in giving those explanations,” he said in court in August. “They’re completely preposterous.”

No Maplehurst staff member took responsibility for inmates being left in their underwear for up to two days after the ICIT operation. Some said they were left unclothed due to a shortage of clean clothes, although that was disproven by other witnesses and video evidence.

Inmates have said in interviews and affidavits filed in court that while they were left in their underwear, jail staff turned on exhaust fans that blew cold air onto the unit, causing them extreme discomfort to the point of pain.

per The Star:
Police Charter violations persist years after Star found cops violating rights of accused with alarming frequency: report
The continuing cost of police Charter violations — the most common being unlawful searches and seizures and delaying access to legal counsel — is resulting in people accused of serious crimes seeing charges tossed and the undermining of public trust, according to the paper, entitled Unlawful Enforcers: Charter Violations by Major Ontario City Police Services.
“Guns, drugs, reliable evidence of child pornography and breathalyzer test results are being excluded from evidence in trials,” finds the report, authored by Sunil Gurmukh, an adjunct law professor at Western University, and University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley.
“Accused, who engaged in criminal activity,” they write, “are walking free.”
From 2015 to 2025, police in Toronto, Ottawa, Peel, York and Durham collectively were called out in court more than 1,000 times for Charter violations in 627 cases, the study found. In seven of every 10 of those cases, accused saw evidence excluded, charges tossed or a reduced sentence imposed.

The OPP report on the officers’ conduct in the Umar Zameer trial was a repackaging of the evidence already heard by an impartial jury that unanimously rejected the officers’ accounts and acquitted Mr. Zameer.  At the conclusion of the trial, the Toronto Police Chief declared that: “we were hoping for a different outcome”.  To achieve that result, the police investigators appointed themselves judge and jury and retried the case by accepting novel theories never tested at trial.  The police intentionally chose this flawed and biased process instead of engaging in a public, independent, and adversarial review of Justice Molloy’s findings. In the wake of the release of the OPP report, the President of the Toronto Police Association and the Premier have called on the trial judge to apologize to the officers involved in the case. These statements are unprecedented and an inappropriate attack on judicial independence. These comments are an attempt to subvert the justice system.     Judicial independence is a cornerstone of our constitutional democracy. Judges must be impartial arbiters to protect the integrity and legitimacy of the courts. Judges are given a wide latitude when deciding issues of credibility because alongside juries, they are in the best position to determine whether or not to believe a witness. Trial judges’ decisions are available to the public and can be appealed by the parties. The public can debate and comment on the outcome.   Judges cannot and should not change or apologize for their decisions based on requests from other branches of government or from witnesses in a case.  Adam Weisberg, President, on behalf of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association For all media inquiries, please email media@criminallawyers.ca

“An Ontario Provincial Police investigation into the conduct of three Toronto police officers who testified at the first-degree murder trial of Umar Zameer has “exonerated” the officers against allegations they lied about the death of their colleague, Const. Jeffrey Northrup.

“They’ve been vindicated,” Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw said at a news conference on Tuesday.

In sum, the OPP’s report, released Tuesday, picks apart the work of a Toronto police reconstructist and re-examines the evidence and testimony presented at trial to conclude there is no evidence that Det. Consts. Lisa Forbes, Antonio Correa and Scharnil Pais lied.

The finding contradicts the conclusions of Zameer’s trial judge, Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy, who made explosive allegations of dishonesty and collusion among the three officers.
Even before its release, doubt was cast on the validity of one police service investigating another by Zameer’s criminal defence lawyer, Nader Hasan, who said in a statement that alleged police misconduct required a “truly independent public review.”

Our Supreme Court struck down mandatory registration under the federal sex offender registry. Finally, we have managed to apply the same principles to Ontario’s sex offender registry. According to The Star:
“The Supremes found that “mandatory registration is overbroad, since it captures offenders who are not at an increased risk to reoffend” and automatic lifetime registration was likewise overbroad. As a result, anyone added since 2011 to the National Sex Offender Registry — which was created after the Ontario registry — could apply to have their status changed.
Parliament amended the national registry to bring it into compliance with the Charter, making mandatory registration application only to repeated offenders or those convicted of serious child sexual offences. Judges now have the discretion to exempt some offenders.
(Justice) Garg concluded the Ontario law is inconsistent with the federal law and needs overhauling.
Roberts’ lawyer, Dean Paquette, told CBC Hamilton that Garg’s ruling is “significant” and could see changes to Ontario’s sex offender registry, depending on how the appeals process plays out. “In time, the argument we have made will be adopted by higher courts and become binding.”