What types of disclosure can I get for my traffic ticket case?

There’s a lot of talk on the internet about disclosure in a traffic ticket case. Disclosure is required to be provided by the Crown upon request in a traffic ticket case, but what types of disclosure you get may surprise you.

The Crown’s duty, as a result of a Supreme Court of Canada case called Stinchcombe, is to disclose all the relevant material in its possession. This includes all things that may prove your guilt or vice versa, things that could prove your innocence.

What is required to be disclosed?

The problem is, that in traffic ticket cases there’s usually not a lot of material in the Crown’s possession. In fact, in most traffic ticket cases, the disclosure that you get is little more than a copy of the ticket and the officer’s notes that accompany it.

In some cases, you may receive vehicle impoundment documents, and in limited circumstances, you may also get audio or video footage of the interaction.

Many people are under the mistaken assumption that police vehicles always have dashcams or police themselves are always wearing cameras, but this is not always the case.

While some police forces do have bodycam footage, they are the exception to the rule, not the norm in British Columbia.

Because traffic ticket cases are often a result of an officer’s observations of you breaking a traffic rule, camera footage may not even capture you committing the offence.

This is because cameras in police vehicles that are equipped with cameras, while they are constantly recording, they don’t always preserve the recording. In some cases, certain things will trigger the cameras to automatically preserve the footage, but not always. For example, if the police vehicle reaches a certain speed or turns on its lights, it will start to preserve the footage. However, as many traffic stops commence from stationary enforcement with officers on foot, a video recording in a police vehicle may not capture much if any of the interaction.

Disclosure differs worldwide

In today’s day and age, you can find information about pretty much everything on the internet. In traffic ticket cases especially, this is not really helpful to people. Because traffic ticket cases vary from province to province and country to country, the information on what types of disclosure might exist in any given case differs worldwide.

In many US states, for example, police are supposed to have records of the calibration of RADAR or LASER devices. In BC, police simply do checks of these devices at the beginning of their shift to ensure they’re in proper working order, and they may or may not take notes of those checks.

If you start to send disclosure requests to police asking for calibration records, you are not likely to get a response.

What types of disclosure can I get?

So going back to the original question, what types of disclosure can you get will really depend on what type of evidence really exists in the case.

You can expect at a minimum though, to receive a copy of your ticket and the officers’ notes. It is not common that there is much more than this disclosure in the vast majority of traffic ticket cases.

With that being said, if you are aware that there is other evidence available but you didn’t get it, you may have options. These include arguing that your Charter rights were violated, seeking an adjournment, which would be the fault of the Crown, or arguing that trial fairness has been compromised by the failure to provide disclosure.

Seeking remedies for non-disclosure, or incomplete disclosure is complex. There must be the correct factual foundation before the court can exercise any discretion to grant an adjournment or grant a Charter remedy. Each of these applications must be done in a very specific type of way.

If you are concerned about the state of disclosure in your traffic ticket case and believe you have an argument to make on the basis of incomplete or unfulfilled disclosure requests, it is best to contact a lawyer to ensure you get the best legal advice possible before making an application that might be doomed to fail.

Scroll to Top
CALL ME NOW