Criminal Law, Explained

Jeremy Macdonald is asleep. He's in a second floor apartment, middle of the night. He's sleeping in his own bed, in his own home. And someone breaks in. And I want you to picture this guy, the intruder.

He's not carrying a gun. He's not carrying a knife, but he's carrying a crossbow. Jeremy, understandably, does not want to be shot with a crossbow. He grabs a kitchen knife, and there's a confrontation. Jeremy, the guy who 30 seconds ago was asleep, comes out on top and the intruder goes to the hospital.

He's badly hurt. The police show up. They charge Jeremy with aggravated assault for defending himself in his own home in the middle of the night against a man with a crossbow. The public loses its mind. Politicians come out swinging.

Here's Premier of Ontario Doug Ford. So, this criminal that's wanted by the police breaks into this guy's house. This guy gives him a beating and this guy gets charged. Something is broken. I know someone breaks into my house or someone else's, you're going to fight for your life.

So, are they right? Do Canada's self-defense laws unfairly restrict and punish Canadians who are just trying to defend their homes and families from intruders who might be armed like with crossbows. My name is George Graham, a criminal defense lawyer based in Toronto. On this channel, I explore topics in criminal law that matter to all Canadians and that all Canadians should understand. Today, we're going to be talking about defending your home.

What does the law actually say? What are the real limits on the force you can use and are these criticisms of our current laws fair? By the end of this video, I'm going to have explained what is really going on with cases like Jeremy's and how it's a bigger problem than anyone is letting on. As always, none of what I'm going to talk about today is legal advice. This video is for educational and entertainment purposes.

If you're in need of legal advice, you should speak with a lawyer. And if you wish, you can reach out to me directly via the contact information below. If someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night, what exactly are you allowed to do by Canadian law to defend yourself and your family? This is obviously an important question. If you're in a situation like that, what you do could shape the rest of your life.

It's your safety, your family's safety, and on the other side of the coin, your freedom. So, this is a question that should have an answer and a clear one. Can you fight the intruder, hit them with a baseball bat? Can you stab them, shoot them? Can you chase them down your driveway?

The criminal code doesn't actually tell you. It doesn't say, for example, lethal force is permitted in this particular circumstance. There is no formula. Instead, section 34 of the criminal code says that your response has to be reasonable in the circumstances. And then it gives a list of up to nine different factors a court should consider when deciding whether it was.

At a press conference in Bmpton a couple of weeks after the McDonald story broke, Pierre Pyv mentioned these nine factors. If you're defending your house, you don't have time to think through nine different conditions. You have one condition to protect yourself and your kids. If you're watching this video and asking yourself how far you can go in defending your home, that line may resonate with you because the law here seems to demand something insane. It seems to demand that you pause in the dark with adrenaline racing and run through a 9-point checklist before deciding how hard to swing.

If if that were really the law, it would be a problem because nobody runs through a 9-point analysis when they're scared for their lives. But here's the thing, the law doesn't actually work that way. Canadian courts figured this out 50 years ago. In a 1975 Ontario Court of Appeal decision called the Queen versus Baxter, Justice Martin wrote a line that has been quoted in almost every serious self-defense case since. He said that a person defending themselves cannot be expected to weigh to a nicity the exact measure of necessary defensive action.

Weigh to a nicity with precision like a chemist measuring out a compound. The court said, "We are not going to ask that of you. You are not in a courtroom when it's happening. You are in your hallway in the dark." And the law gets that.

This principle is so fundamental that when a judge is instructing a jury in a self-defense case and forgets to mention it, that can be a legal error serious enough to get a conviction thrown out. Let me show you an example. Meet Walter Kuna of Toronto. Mr. Kuna is home when his neighbor comes pounding on the door, terrified.

There are men outside and they're trying to force their way in. Kuna pulls his neighbor inside, locks the door, loads a handgun. Through the door, he hears a voice. A stranger is saying, "Shoot him. shoot him.

Then through a side entrance, he sees one of the intruders carrying a shotgun. Kuna steps into the foyer of the home. There's a different man standing there, a man named Baros. Kuna tells him to freeze. Baros doesn't freeze and he starts to turn.

Kuna shoots him twice, once in the leg, once in the lower back. Now, it turns out that this particular intruder was unarmed. The guy with the shotgun was someone else who had already slipped out the back by the time Kuna fired. Kuna had no way of knowing any of that in the moment. But months later, in the well-lit calm of a courtroom, the trial judge looked at those facts and said, "Baros was unarmed and was turning away.

Kuna had the drop on him. The shots, especially the one in the back, were not reasonable. Guilty." But then the case went to the Ontario Court of Appeal. And the Ontario Court of Appeal wrote this.

The trial judge parsed the appellant's reactions down to the split second and held him to a standard of perfection. This was an error in principle, a standard of perfection parsed to the split second. This is the exact criticism Pierre Palev is making about Canadian self-defense law. And here's the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2016 calling that approach an error of law. The court said that the trial judge had effectively imposed on the appellant an obligation to wait and see whether Mr.

Baros had a gun or other weapon before acting. That the court said is not the law. You don't have to wait. You don't have to be right even about whether the threat is real. You have to be reasonable.

And reasonleness is assessed with full awareness that people in stressful and dangerous situations do not have time for subtle reflection. So on the calibration point, the qualv nine conditions point. The critics aren't really being fair here. The law already protects you from being held to a standard of perfection and it has for 50 years. But that's not actually the critic's strongest argument.

And we're going to get to a better one. But first, I need to explain a very important and overlooked aspect of how self-defense laws work in Canada. Here's a question. If you were on trial for assault and your defense was that you acted in self-defense, whose job is it to convince the jury? Most people, if you asked them, would say something like, "Well, the accused has to convince the court that they had to do it."

That's how it works in the movies. The defense lawyer stands up and proves his client was just defending himself. But that's not how it works in Canada. It works almost exactly the opposite way. When you raise self-defense in a Canadian criminal trial, the first thing you have to do is clear a threshold called an error of reality.

Basically, you have to point to some evidence supporting each element of the defense. Not prove it, just point to it. In a home invasion fact pattern, that bar is almost trivially easy to clear. There's an intruder. You felt threatened.

You defended yourself. Done. Once you clear that bar, something remarkable happens. The burden flips entirely to the crown. And the crown doesn't have to convince the court that you probably weren't acting in self-defense.

They have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not a subtle feature of the law. That is one of the most powerful structural protections for an accused person in our entire legal system. And many people have no idea it exists. So, let's break it down.

What specifically does a crown have to disprove in a self-defense case? Section 34 of the criminal code has three elements. To get self-defense, you need all three. and the crown to convict you despite your self-defense claim has to knock out at least one of them beyond a reasonable doubt. So number one, you reasonably believed force or the threat of force was being used against you.

Number two, your purpose was defensive. You were trying to protect yourself or somebody else. And number three, what you did in response was reasonable in the circumstances. In the kind of cases we're talking about, the 3:00 a. m.

home invasion, the first two are going to be almost impossible for the crown to disprove. The intruder really was there. The defender really was scared. The response really was aimed at the threat. So, almost every home invasion prosecution comes down to element three.

Was the force reasonable? And the crown has to prove it wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction. This burden on the crown to disprove self-defense rather than a burden on the accused to justify their actions is a foundational and enormously important aspect of self-defense in Canada and is obviously highly beneficial to someone who has defended their home from a home invasion. Let me introduce you to Ali Man. In Milton, Ontario in 2023, a group of five men break into Mr.

Man's home. One of them is carrying a 9mm handgun. Man, presumably defending himself and his family, shoots and kills one of the intruders. He's charged with seconddegree murder. He pays $130,000 for bail.

He loses his passport. He's ordered as a condition of his bail to live at his grandmother's house. 5 months later, the crown drops the charges. Why? Because, and this should be familiar by now, they looked at the file and they concluded that they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Man hadn't acted in self-defense.

Again, the system worked. Man is legally in the clear, but as with Mr. Kuna, 5 months on bail, that doesn't come back. $130,000 paid to get his freedom while awaiting trial. And if he didn't have that kind of money, he may have spent those 5 months in jail.

And let's go back to the case of Jeremy Macdonald that we started with. In February of this year, 6 months after his apartment was broken into by the man with the crossbow, the crown withdrew all the charges against Mr. McDonald. But for 6 months, Jeremy Macdonald, the man the legal system has now agreed did nothing wrong, was facing this extremely serious charge, had to hire a criminal lawyer, attend court, and watch his name and face all over the news. The critics look at these cases and say, "The law is punishing people for defending themselves, so there's a problem with the law."

The defenders look at these cases and say, "No, the law acquitted them in the end, so it all worked out." Both are kind of right and both are kind of missing the point because in our criminal justice system, an acquitt at trial or a conviction overturned on appeal or even charges withdrawn 6 months into the process. None of these outcomes give you back the money, the reputation or the years of your life that the process took. The process is the punishment. So the real question is this.

If the substantive law is on their side, why does the system grind so hard on them in the first place? In my view, the answer is this. Every law has to balance two things that pull in opposite directions. Number one, you want laws that are flexible, that capture genuinely bad conduct, but also let innocent people off when the facts support it. This requires room for discretion.

But number two, you also want laws that are predictable, so citizens know what they're allowed to do, and the people administering the law know what to do with any given case. These two goals compete. It's tough to have laws that are both flexible and predictable. In 2013, Parliament with the votes of, amongst others, Pierre Polyv, rewrote section 34 of the criminal code to replace a tangle of bright line rules with a single reasonleness test. One simple question, was the act reasonable in the circumstances?

And a list of nine factors a court can consider. No formulas, no thresholds, no bright lines. So, Canada chose flexibility. That wasn't a bad choice, but it has a cost. And the cost is not just that the law is unpredictable.

It's that the law is often inconsistent. On March 17th, 2026 in Vaughn, Ontario, three young men broke into a home. One of them was carrying a firearm. The homeowner had a firearm of his own. He fired at the intruder, striking one of them.

Sound familiar? The facts, from what is publicly known, are almost identical to those of the MIM case. But here's the difference. In this recent case, the homeowner was not charged. His name was not released.

He did not have to post bail. He did not have to hire a lawyer. York Regional Police held a press conference and the spokesperson, I'm quoting, said, "We recognize that in situations involving armed intruders, the immediate threat to life is paramount." In other words, this was self-defense. Case closed.

So, stop and think about that for a second. Apparently, quite similar, substantive conduct, but completely different procedural outcomes. Why? One answer may be that the facts were somehow different. We don't know.

But the harder, more honest answer that gets at us something fundamental is this. Different cops, different day, different supervisor reviewing the charges, different crown attorney assigned to the case, different people exercising discretion in different ways. This is an open secret in criminal law. Most people think of the law as this impersonal system. It really isn't.

Individual people, cops, crowns, judges, juries, defense lawyers matter enormously. The same conduct handed to different decision makers produces different outcomes. One cop will charge, another won't. One crown will prosecute to trial, another will look at the same file and withdraw on day one. One judge will convict, another on the same evidence to acquit.

This is not a defect that somebody forgot to fix. This is for better for worse how the system actually works. And this is why changing the substance of self-defense law is unlikely to touch the core problem because the core problem is the discretion. And not only is it very difficult to write discretion out of criminal law, trying to do it means going back to bright line rules. And bright line rules are exactly the thing Parliament moved away from in 2013 because they produce unjust outcomes in cases they weren't written for.

Canadian self-defense law is not broken. But like much of criminal law in Canada, it is vague. In this country, criminal law is administered by human beings exercising enormous discretion. And disparities in the outcome of that discretion are most felt between the charge and the verdict by people who in the end the law says did nothing wrong. If you or someone you know is facing a criminal charge for defending themselves or for any other reason, you can reach out to my firm via the contact information below to discuss your situation.

For everyone else, if you found this video helpful, make sure to hit the like and subscribe button. Thanks for watching.

Every day, roughly 400,000 people cross the Canada US border. For most, this is annoying, maybe stressful, but ultimately an uneventful process. However, for a small number, the events that follow a border crossing will change their lives forever. You don't want to be in that number. My name is George Gray.

I'm a criminal defense lawyer based in Toronto. On this channel, I explore topics in criminal law that matter to all Canadians and that all Canadians should understand. Today, we're going to talk about the border. First, we're going to talk about drugs at the border. How much trouble would you be in if you were caught with drugs in your suitcase and how likely are you to get caught?

Then, we're going to talk about the powers of border guards and what rights you have at the border. Finally, we're going to focus on phones and laptops. Can border guards search your phone? And if they can, are you required to provide your password to them? The answers are going to surprise you, especially if you live in Ontario or Alberta.

So, before you plan your next trip abroad, watch this video to learn the basics that can help you stay out of legal trouble. And as always, none of what I'm going to talk about today is legal advice. This video is for entertainment and educational purposes. If you're in need of legal advice, you should speak with a lawyer. If you wish, you can reach out to my firm directly via the contact information below.

So, let's talk about drugs at the border. Drugs are by a wide margin the most frequently found contraband at the border. The basics are that if you are caught crossing into or from Canada with illegal drugs, you will very likely be charged with the offense of importing or exporting a controlled substance. This is a very serious offense, straight indictable with a max sentence of life in prison for schedule one drugs like cocaine, MBMA, and most opiates. Marijuana remains illegal to cross the border with.

And if you were caught crossing the border with marijuana, you would be charged under the Cannabis Act. It's still a serious offense for which the crown would likely seek a jail sentence. So, does it matter how much drugs? Yes, it does matter a lot. Now, there is no minimum threshold.

So, technically, even trace amounts of a drug like cocaine could bring the same charges as bringing 20 kilos across the border. And the crown does not have to prove that you intended to sell the drugs once you got across the border. But they do need to prove that you intentionally brought drugs across the border. So, if it's a small amount, the crown may not be able to convince a judge or a jury that this wasn't just an accident. Now, let's talk about how much trouble crossing the border with drugs could get you in.

And I'm going to focus on cocaine. In Canada, you could assault your wife. You could drive at twice the legal limit of alcohol in your blood. Or you could deal dangerous drugs to addicts on the street. You can do any of these things, and you will stand an excellent chance of staying out of jail.

But if you cross the border with a substantial amount of cocaine, the starting point for sentencing is 6 years in the pan. There are very few other offenses in Canada that will get a first offender a sentence that long. Now obviously there are many reasons why drug smuggling is wrong and needs to be punished. The national security interests of Canada in policing and securing its border are of course important, but the other crimes that I mentioned are serious too. And is it really clear that the moral culpability associated with crossing a border with drugs is that much worse than say inflicting violence on someone?

And the sad truth is that most people caught smuggling drugs are young women with no criminal records. Many of whom have been manipulated into taking drugs across the border. And the real bad guys who are pulling the puppet strings and making real money are rarely caught. So my PSA is this. Please understand that if you are caught carrying drugs across the border, the law will deal with you very severely, more severely than it would with the vast majority of other crimes.

But people don't smuggle drugs because they think they will get a light sentence. People smuggle drugs because they think they won't get caught. But people underestimate the sophistication of the tools that are available to border guards. And it starts before you even get to the airport. So, if you are booked on a flight into or out of Canada, the CBSA, the Canada Border Services Agency, will have already looked at your profile to assess the risk that you are carrying contraband.

Now, their exact methods are confidential, but they're certainly going to be looking for things like your travel patterns and especially whether you are traveling alone. They're going to look at when you bought your ticket and they'll be looking in particular for lastminute ticket purchases. They will look at how you paid for your ticket and how the cost of the ticket lines up with what they know about your financial means. Now, you should know the CBSA shares information with other government ministries. So, they may know more about you than you might expect.

And of course, they're going to be looking at where you come from with more concern about airports that service South America, Houston, or Miami, and of course, direct flights from South America and the Caribbean. No single factor is going to get you flagged, but taken together, the CBSA's algorithm may deem you to be suspicious. When that happens, a lookout will be issued, meaning that they've already decided to pull you aside for secondary screening, often before you even step foot in the airport. If this process seems opaque, just wait until 2027. That is when the CBSA plans to fully implement a new AI generated border tool.

Not unlike the 2002 film Minority Report, this tool, called the Traveler Compliance Indicator, is going to assign a score to every traveler that predicts whether they're going to be behaving badly or not. Welcome to the dystopian future where we're policed by artificial intelligence. When you first arrive at customs, everyone goes through primary screening. But if you're flagged by a lookout or seem suspicious during primary screening or perhaps are just chosen at random, then you're sent to secondary. There you can be confident that border guards will very likely find anything you're trying to hide.

They will question you in much greater detail, but they can also search and x-ray and run tests on your luggage. For example, they can run what's called a nick test on your suitcase or your clothing or even your credit card. This test will show positive if your belongings have ever been in contact or even close to a narcotic. If there is a positive nick test, that is not grounds for being charged, but border agents are then likely going to begin what they call destructive inspections. That means they're going to empty your suitcase and start cutting into it or dismantling it.

And they are very likely going to find anything you might have hidden there. And here's where you might say to me, "As a Canadian, don't I have the right under the charter to be free of a search this intrusive without a warrant?" And that brings me to my next point. I often hear from clients who are surprised to learn that their rights under the charter do not apply, at least to the same extent, when they're crossing a border. The Supreme Court of Canada in a 1988 decision called Simons wrote, "The degree of personal privacy reasonably expected at customs is lower than in most other situations.

People do not expect to be able to cross international borders free from scrutiny. It is commonly accepted that sovereign states have the right to control both who and what enters their boundaries. Fair enough. But what are the practical implications of this? Well, for one, the protections of section 8 of the charter, the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, are deeply diluted.

CBSA agents are able to search you and your luggage without a warrant up to and including strip searches and body cavity searches. And what other charter rights are dialed back? Well, what about the right to silence under section 7 of the charter? At the border, you are required by law to answer questions about what you're bringing into the country and to do so honestly. What else?

Well, you're not allowed to just leave. Once you're in customs, there's no turning back. In a very real sense, you are being detained there until they say you can go. So, does that mean that you have the right to a lawyer like you normally would upon being detained? Well, it gets complicated.

What constitutes a detention legally speaking is different at the border than it is elsewhere. And routine questions and searches do not constitute a detention. But what you need to understand is that these rights are only diluted up to a certain point. If and when the questions posed to you go beyond routine questioning and searches and you become subject of what is called particularized suspicion. At that point, your charter rights are back and you need to speak with a lawyer ASAP.

This brings me to my fourth point. For good reason. Few travelers understand if and when border agents are allowed to look through their cell phones or laptops. Hold on because this gets a little complicated. The CBSA has always taken the position that electronic devices are like any other good brought across the border and thus they are able to and in fact required by the Customs Act to inspect them like they would with a suitcase.

And up until fairly recently, courts had ruled that the CBSA was right. Without any objective evidence of wrongdoing required, CBSA officers were allowed to search travelers phones and that they did. Border agents in Canada has searched tens of thousands of phones and other devices over the past number of years. However, in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal found that groundless searches of electronic devices at the border were unconstitutional. And in 2024, the Ontario Court of Appeal decided the same thing.

The Ontario Court of Appeals said that the search of a cell phone is so fundamentally more intrusive compared to the search of a suitcase that there needs to be something more than a hunch by border guards to justify a search. Both appellet courts gave Parliament time to amend the Customs Act before their ruling striking down portions of that act were given effect, but the time for that has now passed and Parliament didn't change anything. As a result, the portions of the Customs Act allowing groundless searches of digital devices is officially of no force and effect in Ontario and Alberta. This has resulted in a rather bizarre situation. The CBSA has issued internal bulletins instructing its officers that they must have reasonable grounds to suspect an offense before searching a digital device.

But their statutory basis for searching phones at all in Alberta and Ontario no longer exists. So where does that leave us? In Ontario and Alberta, CBSA officers are relying on internal policy and on common law search powers rather than on any statutory authority. And it's highly debatable if they have the power to search phones in these provinces at all. Now, this video has been filmed in March 2026.

The situation can change at any time, so this may no longer be accurate depending on when you're watching this. What is clear, though, is that at the border, searches of a phone are no longer seen as being on the same level as a search of a suitcase. Officers must have some kind of basis for believing that a traveler is involved in a crime in order to search their digital devices. As we discussed earlier, the existence of such a particularized suspicion has implications for your rights. If an officer is seeking to search your phone, there is a good argument that you would be considered detained and therefore must be told without delay that you have the right to a lawyer.

And you can even ask a border officer, if my phone is being searched based on a reasonable suspicion, am I now under detention and do I have the right to a lawyer? If you're not told you have the right to a lawyer, this could have implications down the road at a potential trial. But the law now is so uncertain at this point in time that charges relating to a scenario like this would be extremely vulnerable to a charter challenge at trial, especially in Ontario and Alberta. Now, setting aside whether border agents are entitled to search your devices if they wish to do so, do you have to provide your password? The first thing to note is that it is an offense under the Customs Act to resist or refuse to comply with the lawful border search.

This is the offense of hindering. However, as we've been discussing, it is not exactly clear at this point when a border search of a phone is lawful. And the current CBSA policy is to confiscate devices and not charge for hindering just for refusing to provide a device password. And remember that the provisions of the Customs Act that are interpreted as requiring travelers to provide their device password have been read down now in Ontario and Alberta. So if you refuse to provide a password in one of those provinces, the CBSA cannot point to a valid constitutional statute that compels you to do so.

However, the CBSA still can and likely will seize your device for further examination. This doesn't require your password. They just send your phone to a forensic lab to be cracked, a process that usually takes months. Also, if you are not a Canadian citizen, a refusal to provide a device password could be used as a basis to deny you entry into Canada entirely. Crossing the border is routine for most Canadians, but knowing what can happen and what your rights are can make the difference between a smooth re-entry and a legal nightmare.

If you are dealing with a legal situation involving a border crossing or any criminal issue, feel free to reach out to my office directly via the contact information in the description below. For everyone else, if you found this video interesting, please like and subscribe for more deep dives on how criminal law works in real life. Thanks for watching.

In any big city in Canada, you can walk into a store, browse an ample selection of magic mushrooms, and buy whatever you want. So, you could be forgiven for thinking that magic mushrooms have been legalized in Canada or that there has been some kind of change to their legal status. And indeed, there has been a change in how magic mushrooms are seen in our society. Survey data suggests that two million Canadians used psychedelics last year. Many of them purchasing magic mushrooms from a local dispensary.

And there is serious ongoing research into magic mushrooms as treatment for PTSD, for depression, addiction, and many of these medical trials are taking place here in Canada. So, our society's views and understanding of magic mushrooms really have been changing. But all this raises an important question. Has the criminal law kept pace with changes in how our society views magic mushrooms? My name is George Gray.

I'm a criminal defense lawyer based in Toronto. On this channel, I explore topics in criminal law that matter to all Canadians and that all Canadians should understand. Today, we're going to talk about magic mushrooms. We're going to talk about their legal status in Canada and about how much trouble you'd realistically be in if you were caught with magic mushrooms. I'm also going to explain how you might be committing the criminal offense of trafficking magic mushrooms without even knowing it.

We're going to talk about the legal status of magic mushroom dispensaries and how they stay open and what happens when they are raided by police. And finally, we're going to talk about whether legalization is realistically going to happen for magic mushrooms in Canada. Now, before we go any further, I need to mention that none of what I'm going to talk about today is legal advice. This video is for educational and entertainment purposes. If you need legal advice, you should speak with a lawyer.

If you'd like, you can reach out to my firm directly via the contact information below. So, the first thing that you need to know is that magic mushrooms do remain illegal to possess in Canada. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is listed in schedule 3 of the Controlled drugs and substances act. So, it is illegal to possess kind of. Back in 2020, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, Canada's Drug Prosecutors said, "We're really just focused on the trafficking side of things.

So mostly we're not going to prosecute personal possession of drugs. Not just magic mushrooms, any drugs. So while psilocybin remains illegal on the books, possessing a small amount for your own use is generally not prosecuted. And that doesn't quite mean you'll never be charged because the police are not subject to this policy. But even that is quite rare.

Now, there are some important exceptions to this policy, and I'm not going to be able to get into all of them in this video. But the biggest caveat that needs to be mentioned is for trafficking. And many people might think, I'm not a drug dealer. I'm not selling drugs. So, how could I be guilty of trafficking?

But the definition of trafficking is broader than you might think. The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act defines trafficking to include, yes, selling, but also administering and also giving drugs. So, if you were to share some magic mushrooms with a friend, that would technically constitute trafficking, a controlled substance, which does remain a prosecuted offense in Canada. However, charges in a situation like that would be very unlikely because of the quantity of drugs involved. Most cases where an intention to traffic magic mushrooms is proven in court involve kilograms of magic mushrooms.

The lowest amount I have seen in the case law was about 500 gram or half a kilo. Even with that amount of magic mushrooms, it would be tough to argue that it was all for your own use. I also want to mention that purchasing illegal drugs does not make you guilty of trafficking. Parliament has specifically excluded purchasers from the offense. So purchasing a small amount of psilocybin would only make out personal possession which would normally fall under the non-prosecution policy that I just mentioned.

Now in reality there have been very few reported cases of convictions for trafficking only in magic mushrooms. However, all that changed in 2024. In 2023 and in 2024, shroom dispensaries started opening up across Canada. Police sometimes turned a blind eye to these stores. Canadian cities are struggling with drug addiction issues involving far more harmful substances than magic mushrooms.

So, some police services, including the Toronto Police Service, have indicated that enforcing laws against magic mushroom trafficking is a lower priority. But despite having other priorities, magic mushroom dispensaries are raided by police from time to time and criminal charges are now frequently laid. When these cases end up in court, there is a division in the case law. On one hand, we see decisions where sentencing judges are highly sympathetic to dispensary workers. Typically, it's the low-level employees that are caught.

They're making minimum wage, selling a drug that causes little societal harm, at least in comparison to other drugs. And sometimes these workers don't even seem to know the stores they are working in are illegal. So, let's look at some examples. In the 2024 case of the King versus Vagenos, the accused was working behind the counter at a dispensary called the Mushroom Cabinet in Hamilton. He sold magic mushrooms to an undercover officer and the next day he was arrested when the store was raided by police.

He pleaded guilty to possession of psilocybin for the purpose of trafficking. The sentencing judge gave Mr. Vagenos a conditional discharge. A conditional discharge is a way of finding a person guilty without sending them to jail and without giving them a permanent criminal record. It's one of the lightest sanctions available in criminal law.

The judge in that case zeroed in on the lack of harm caused by magic mushrooms, especially in comparison to other drugs. He wrote, "Silocily is not to blame for what afflicts Hamilton's urban core. Housing instability, mental unwellness, property crime, and violent tendencies cannot be tied to the consumption of psilocybin." Like for Mr. Vagenos, most dwar clerks arrested working in dispensaries have received the same sentence, a conditional discharge with probation.

However, some judges have given harsher sentences and seem to be exasperated by the open nature of these dispensaries. The law is what it is and courts can't sanction such brazen rulebreaking. For example, in the 2024 case of the King versus Osaurus, the accused was a store clerk working at a dispensary called Shrooms located in Queen West in Toronto. He was sentenced to possession of 17 kg of magic mushrooms. The sentencing judge focused on the open nature of how this dispensary operated.

He wrote, "Mr. Osaurus was involved in illegal commercial activity. Law-ab-bing citizens who see this type of store operating in public so brazenly must wonder how it can be allowed to continue and why those involved appear to escape accountability. I find this business's open and notorious features to be extraordinarily aggravating. In this case, the judge sentenced Mr.

Osaurus to 60 days of house arrest, leaving him with a permanent criminal record. We see similar sentences to this and longer in cases of more senior employees like store managers. But the only reported cases where people have been sent to jail for trafficking magic mushrooms were cases that involved significantly worse circumstances, either other drugs or evidence of trafficking mushrooms to minors. This is of course always subject to change and jail is certainly an available sentence for trafficking psilocybin. So now you know that despite scant enforcement of rules against possessing magic mushrooms, there can be serious criminal sanctions for trafficking them.

If this scenario feels familiar, it should be. This is more or less the way things were in Canada for marijuana in the early 2010s. As you may remember, after a long series of court challenges and different attempts to regulate cannabis, recreational use of cannabis was finally legalized in 2018. So, are we headed in that same direction for magic mushrooms? Like cannabis, psilocybin is not without risks.

But those risks are relatively low, especially compared to other substances like alcohol or prescription opiates that are both legal to consume. And it is increasingly now accepted that psilocybin can be an effective way of treating certain health conditions. It's also now possible to obtain a Health Canada exemption to allow patients to legally obtain medical psilocybin for treatment of things like depression. However, the treatment regime is very supervised and difficult to access. Even if you're able to find a doctor to apply on your behalf, the majority of these applications are denied.

This is something to keep an eye on because with cannabis legalization, the rights of patients to reasonable access to cannabis as a means of medical treatment was an important trigger for eventual full legalization. As we get more and more evidence for the medical benefits of psilocybin, there will be increasing pressure on the government from the courts to make it easier for people to get legal access to mushrooms as a form of treatment. Outside of medical benefits, people on magic mushrooms often report having spiritual or mystical experiences that have a highly positive impact on their lives. This was more or less the basis for a recent court challenge to laws prohibiting psilocybin in the 2025 case of the king versus the killer. Samura, the owner of a fungi dispensary in London, Ontario, was the accused.

His store had been raided by police and he was charged with trafficking magic mushrooms. His lawyers argued that access to psilocybin is critical to allow a person to experience the full freedom of thought that is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the judge in that case disagreed and wrote that the experience of taking a psychedelic drug is not what the freedom of thought was meant to protect. For that judge, the experience of a mushrooms trip is too unpredictable to be a protected form of thought. But there are other cases currently before the courts challenging restrictions on accessing magic mushrooms, and you can bet there will be many more coming.

I asked at the beginning of this video if criminal law has kept pace with changes in how our society views magic mushrooms. In some ways, it has. Prosecutions for possession of drugs for personal use are now much less common than they used to be. And like we saw with cannabis dispensaries, police seem to treat magic mushroom dispensaries as a low priority target, meaning that many such dispensaries are able to stay open. However, the law hasn't actually changed.

Psilocybin remains a controlled substance in Canada and when cases do reach the courts. Judges are forced to wrestle with what that means in a society whose views seem to be changing. My personal view is that if medical studies continue to show that psilocybin is capable of treating conditions that other drugs cannot, the government will have to provide legal and easy access to medical psilocybin in the near future, probably the next 3 to 5 years. Whether that takes a form of full legalization like it did with cannabis or a more limited scheme remains to be seen. Regardless of legalization, one place that you don't want to be with magic mushrooms or cannabis or any other drug is the border.

Some of the harshest sentences in Canadian criminal law are reserved for offenses involving international crossings. And even for travelers carrying nothing illegal, a border search can raise questions about your privacy and rights. In my next video, I'll walk you through what really happens when you cross an international border and how you can do it without putting yourself in legal jeopardy. If you or someone you know is facing a drug charge or any criminal charge, please feel free to reach out to me directly via the contact information below. For everyone else, if you found this video interesting, please like and subscribe for more insights into how Canadian criminal law works in real life.

Thank you for watching.