Waterloo Region Record courts reporter 2015 to 2023. Left to join PRINT at launch. Has covered more than 300 criminal trials and dozens of civil matters in the Waterloo Region. Keeps a database of every Ontario Court of Justice appearance in the area going back to 2018.
Beats: policing, criminal courts, civil liberties, Charter rights
Contact: l.hebert@printmag.org
He qualifies for legal aid. He is facing criminal charges in Ontario. He picked up the phone and worked through a list of criminal defence lawyers, one after another, past fifty, and not a single one would accept his legal aid certificate. The right to a lawyer is written into the Constitution. It means nothing when no lawyer will take the case.
On a February night near Stone Road East in Guelph, a man called 911 about a vehicle. Eleven minutes later he called back and cancelled. The dispatch log records the reason in three words: came to agreement. The officers were already moving, and they did not turn around. One of the charges the accused now faces rests entirely on the call that was withdrawn before they ever arrived.
A man sat in a parked car in front of his home in Kitchener on the afternoon of March 15, 2026, working on a laptop physically mounted to the steering wheel. The engine was off. There were no keys. The car was in Park. Tesla's own vehicle telemetry confirms it never moved. Three officers arrived. What happened over the next seventeen hours and twenty minutes is documented on nine cameras, confirmed in six independently produced vehicle data points, and contradicted in five official police documents submitted to a bail court, a charge-screening Crown, and a provincial court judge.
The arresting officer in a Guelph impaired-driving matter runs an Axon body camera and a transport in-car recording system. Both are made by the same manufacturer. On the night of the arrest, the transport recording ran for two hours and eleven minutes. Every single audio sample across those two hours, all 754,680,736 of them, registered at exactly negative ninety-one decibels. That is the codec noise floor. That is silence. Her body camera, on the same night, at a bit rate sixty-three times higher, captured normal sound.
The Intoxilyzer 9000, serial number 90-004868, administered a Subject Test on the afternoon of March 15, 2026, at a Kitchener police station. The result was zero milligrams of alcohol per one hundred millilitres of blood. The machine has produced no other result on this file, because no other test was run. The accused is charged with impaired operation, blood alcohol concentration over eighty milligrams. There is no blood alcohol concentration on the file. There is a zero. The charge remains.
At three minutes past four on the afternoon of March 15, 2026, a citizen in custody at a Kitchener police station, who had been denied his prescribed insulin and clonazepam three times, performed a handstand against the wall of Interview Room 9. At approximately fourteen minutes past four he was on his hands and knees on the floor. At approximately thirty-nine minutes past four he was in a fetal position. At approximately two minutes past six, he was placed in front of the Intoxilyzer. The booking report filed by the arresting officer says: Force used, No. Conductive weapon used, No. The station cameras say otherwise on both counts.
Ontario police services have, over the last six years, deployed body-worn cameras at a cost to the public that this province's auditor general estimated, in a 2024 report, at over two hundred million dollars. The cameras are supposed to produce an objective record of police-citizen encounters. What the country has not built, alongside the camera deployment, is any independent mechanism for verifying that the record the camera produces is the record that actually happened. The gap between these two things is where this story lives.
A network of for-profit plasma collection centres has opened quietly across this country over the last decade, paying donors in the range of twenty-five to fifty dollars a session, twice a week if the donor presents and passes the screen. The donors are, by every demographic study of the practice, overwhelmingly people who need the twenty-five dollars. The plasma is processed into medicines the country's sickest citizens depend on. The country has looked at this arrangement and called it healthcare.
The arrest was the citizen's. The cell was the citizen's. The bail order was the citizen's. The car the regional police service of record sent the tow truck to remove from the curb belonged to neither the citizen nor the citizen's lawyer nor the citizen's defence file. It belonged to a senior in her seventies who had not been charged with anything, had not been suspected of anything, had not been spoken to by the police on the night in question, and who had no operational reason on this earth to have been deprived, by morning, of the vehicle she uses to drive a ninety-six-year-old to her medical appointments. The country, when it allowed the regional police service of record to send the tow truck, allowed the senior to be the secondary victim of a policing decision she was not part of.
An Ontario police service produces, in writing, a synopsis asserting that the accused has a prior conviction. The national criminal records database, when searched, returns no such conviction. The service does not, on enquiry, retract. The prosecution proceeds on the asserted conviction. This is not a clerical error. This is a documented practice. The country has tools for it. The country has been slow to use them.
An Ontario bail order requires the accused to ride only in the back seat of any vehicle in which the accused is a passenger. The accused, before the order, had insisted on his right to speak with the lawyer of his choice and had declined to sign a Form 11 in the absence of that consultation. The country imposed the back-seat condition anyway. The country also called it justice.
He gave up the bedroom for six visiting family members, four of them children. He took a blanket, walked outside, and got into a car at the curb. The car was off. The keys were not on the scene. The car belonged to the seventy-two-year-old woman who lives at the house and cares for the ninety-six-year-old who owns it. He fell asleep. Four armed officers arrived. No screening device was used. No field test was administered. No alcohol inquiry was made. The lawyer he asked for has now twice confirmed, in writing, on her own letterhead, that no call from the police reached her firm that day. The car was towed by a contractor who needed skates because there was no key. He spent the night in a cell. Three charges were filed against a man who, by every available reading of the verb, had been sleeping. Every second of it was recorded on three independent video sources. This is the country's policing in plain English. Read it slowly. Read it twice.
An officer who refuses to give their name and number, when a citizen lawfully asks for them, has failed at the floor of their job. The country has accepted this failure for too long. There is no operational, statutory, or moral defence of it. There is, however, a long and embarrassing record of officers behaving, on the public dime, like the high-school children they once were and were never asked to outgrow.
In 2015 the federal government promised to end every long-term drinking water advisory on First Nations land within five years. The deadline passed in 2021. Years later, dozens of communities still cannot drink from their taps, and one northern community has been boiling its water since 1995. This is a retrospective about a promise the richest version of the country keeps explaining instead of keeping.