When Does Delay in Delivering Reasons Undermine a Conviction?

Joseph A. Neuberger and Michael P. Bury, Neuberger & Partners LLP, Criminal Lawyers Toronto

In R. v. Qita, 2026 ONCA 554, released on July 30, 2026, the Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside convictions and ordered a new trial not because of any error in the trial judge’s factual findings or legal analysis, but because of the time she took to deliver her written reasons. The decision is a significant restatement of the principles governing the presumption of judicial integrity, and a cautionary illustration of how a prolonged and inadequately explained delay can deprive a trial judge’s reasons of their evidentiary value on appeal.

01 • BACKGROUND

The appellant Wissam Qita, an immigration consultant who also operated an information-technology business through the corporate appellant 7891296 Canada Inc., faced fourteen counts of misrepresentation and counselling misrepresentation under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The charges arose from nine applications made under the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program, under which private sponsors — rather than the government — assume financial and non-financial responsibility for refugee claimants they identify.

The Crown alleged, among other things, that Mr. Qita acted simultaneously as both sponsor and compensated consultant, had applicants prepay the settlement funds he was required to hold in order to qualify as a sponsor, represented himself to authorities as an uncompensated representative despite charging consulting fees, and advised certain claimants to deny to immigration officials that they had paid him. His corporation represented that it held $150,000 in trust for the applicants when those funds had in fact already been withdrawn.

Following a trial conducted over some 25 non-consecutive days, the trial judge convicted Mr. Qita on ten of the fourteen counts and sentenced him to three and a half years’ imprisonment; the corporate appellant was fined $20,000. The appeal, however, turned on a discrete legal issue unrelated to the merits of those findings.

02 • THE CHRONOLOGY OF DELAY

The trial judge announced bottom-line verdicts on March 11, 2022 — a bare declaration of guilt, unaccompanied by reasons, with detailed reasons promised within “two to three weeks.” Those reasons were not released until December 19, 2022, nine months and nine days later. The intervening period was marked by a succession of adjournments and unmet deadlines, punctuated by inquiries from counsel and only occasional explanation from the trial judge, who at various points cited difficulty working at a computer and the demands of a concurrent jury trial.

03 • THE PRESUMPTION OF JUDICIAL INTEGRITY

Canadian law begins from a strong presumption that a trial judge’s reasons reflect the reasoning that led to the verdict, rather than an after-the-fact justification of a conclusion already reached. This presumption, closely allied to the presumption of judicial impartiality, is not easily displaced. As the Supreme Court held in R. v. Teskey, 2007 SCC 25, and as this Court reaffirmed, delay in the delivery of reasons will not, on its own, rebut the presumption. Nevertheless, the longer the interval between verdict and reasons, the greater the concern that the requisite link between the two has been lost. The governing inquiry is objective: whether an informed and reasonable observer, considering the totality of the circumstances, would apprehend that the reasons were constructed to defend a verdict rather than to explain how it was genuinely reached.

04 • THE COURT’S ANALYSIS

Writing for a unanimous panel, Trotter J.A. applied the non-exhaustive factors identified in Teskey and concluded that five of the seven were engaged. The case was factually complex and, on the trial judge’s own description, a “daunting” and “overwhelming” process; the March 2022 pronouncement was a bare declaration of guilt devoid of reasoning; the evidence called for detailed analysis; the trial judge’s responsiveness to counsel’s requests was uneven; and the ultimate delay was inordinate and largely unexplained.

The Court rejected the Crown’s submission that the earlier, thorough reasons dismissing a directed-verdict motion supplied context legitimizing the bare verdicts. The directed-verdict inquiry — whether any evidence exists on which a properly instructed trier could convict, taking the Crown’s case at its highest — is materially different from the ultimate determination of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on the whole of the evidence, including the defence evidence that had not yet been called when the directed-verdict motion was argued.

Two considerations beyond the Teskey factors proved decisive.

First, in dismissing the appellants’ subsequent application under s. 11(b) of the Charter, the trial judge characterized the entire nine-month period during which she prepared her reasons as “deliberation time.” The Court found this description troubling. Deliberation is the process of reasoning toward a verdict; once a verdict has been announced, the preparation of reasons is intended to explain that decision, not to continue making it. A statement that the judge was still deliberating after announcing guilt tends to suggest that the reasons subsequently produced were the product of continued reasoning post-verdict — precisely the concern the presumption of integrity guards against, and a characterization in tension with the Supreme Court’s framing of “verdict deliberation time” in R. v. K.G.K., 2020 SCC 7.

Second, the appellants tendered, without objection from the Crown, a colour-coded comparison demonstrating that approximately 75 percent of the final reasons for judgment were identical to, or contained only minor variations from, the earlier directed-verdict reasons. This undermined the trial judge’s own suggestion that the length of her reasons accounted for the delay. As a substantial portion of the reasons had already been written, the delay persisted while the trial judge drafted the passages engaging with the defence’s contested evidence — supporting an inference that she continued to deliberate on those issues after the verdict had been rendered.

05 • DISPOSITION

The Court held that the appellants had met the high threshold of rebutting the presumption of integrity. It emphasized that nothing within the reasons themselves betrayed a disconnect between the verdict and the explanation; but that, it observed, is not the test. Applying an objective standard, a reasonable and informed observer would apprehend that the reasons were an after-the-fact justification of a decision reached months earlier. The reasons therefore could not be relied upon on appeal, and — the Crown conceding that the bare verdict alone could not sustain the convictions — the convictions were set aside and a new trial ordered.

06 • COMMENT

The Court’s concluding observations merit attention. Trotter J.A. acknowledged that a finding that the presumption of “integrity” has been rebutted “strikes a harsh tone,” given the word’s ordinary association with personal character, and suggested that “authenticity” might more accurately describe what is under scrutiny — the trial judge’s work product rather than her honour — while recognizing that “integrity” remains the established term in the jurisprudence. The panel was careful to affirm that its conclusion cast no aspersion on the trial judge personally, describing her as a hard-working judge who, in a genuinely difficult case, did not have sufficient time to complete her reasons.

Qita establishes no fixed temporal limit beyond which reasons become unreliable. Its significance lies in its demonstration of how prolonged, poorly explained delay — particularly when coupled with indications that a judge continued to reason toward the verdict after announcing it — can lead a reasonable observer to lose confidence in the connection between decision and explanation. For the accused, and for the public, the entitlement to know not merely that a conviction has been entered but why it has been entered is a substantive component of the appearance of justice, and one that appellate courts will enforce where the Teskey threshold is met.

Neuberger & Partners LLP, Criminal Lawyers Toronto.