Justice Delayed: How a Nine-Month Wait for Reasons Overturned a Conviction in R v Qita

Judges have a duty to explain the reasons for their decisions. In some cases, busy judges may give a “bottom line” ruling up front and deliver their reasons at a later date. But where those “reasons to follow” come months or years after the evidence at trial, they can start to seem like an after-the-fact justification for the decision, rather than a timely record of why the judge came to the conclusion they did. Where a reasonable person would so conclude, the reasons must be discarded—and in some cases, the convictions as well.

That is what happened in R v Qita, 2026 ONCA 554, a case from the Court of Appeal for Ontario argued by lead counsel Chris Rudnicki. The Court set aside the convictions and ordered a new trial, in a judgment that reaffirms an important safeguard of a fair trial: the assurance that a judge's reasons genuinely explain how a decision was reached, rather than justifying it after the fact.

What Happened

The appellants were an immigration consultant and his numbered corporation. Mr. Qita was charged, along with the company, with a series of offences under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act arising from applications made under the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. The Crown alleged misrepresentation and counselling misrepresentation in connection with the sponsorship of nine Syrian refugee families. Following a trial, Mr. Qita was found guilty of ten of fourteen counts and sentenced to three and a half years in prison; the company was fined.

But the appeal did not turn on the details of the immigration offences. It turned on a single, discrete issue: the length of time the trial judge took to deliver her written reasons for finding the appellants guilty.

The Timeline

The sequence of events was at the heart of the case. The trial judge announced her verdicts — guilty on ten counts — on March 11, 2022. But she did so as a "bottom-line" decision: a bare announcement of the result, with detailed written reasons promised to follow. She estimated those reasons would be ready within two or three weeks.

They were not. Over the following months, the release of reasons was repeatedly rescheduled. The Crown and defence made numerous inquiries. Dates came and went. The trial judge, communicating largely through court staff, was often apologetic but offered an explanation only twice. The written reasons were finally released on December 19, 2022 — nine months and nine days after the guilty verdicts had been announced, and roughly fifteen months after closing submissions had ended.

The Legal Principle: The "Presumption of Integrity"

Canadian law starts from a strong presumption that a trial judge's written reasons reflect the actual reasoning that led to the verdict. This is called the presumption of integrity, and it is closely tied to the presumption that judges act impartially. It is not easily displaced.

There is nothing improper, on its own, about a judge announcing a verdict with “reasons to follow”. Sometimes it is necessary or desirable. And delay by itself does not rebut the presumption. But as the Court explained, drawing on the leading Supreme Court of Canada decision in R v Teskey, the longer the gap between the verdict and the reasons, the greater the concern that the reasons may not truly reflect how the judge actually decided the case. The worry is subtle but serious: once a judge has publicly committed to a result, a reasonable person may fear that the later reasons became an exercise in defending that result rather than an open-minded account of how it was reached — even if the judge never consciously intended anything of the kind.

The test is objective. The question is not what was actually going on in the judge's mind, which no court could ever reliably determine. It is how the situation would appear to an informed and reasonable observer considering all the circumstances.

The Court's Analysis

Applying the factors from Teskey, Justice Trotter concluded that five of them were present here: the trial judge had evident difficulty reaching her verdicts; the verdicts were announced as bare conclusions with no reasoning; the case was factually complex and demanded careful analysis; the judge was only intermittently responsive to counsel's requests for reasons; and the overall delay was inordinate and largely unexplained.

Two further features, unique to this case, reinforced the conclusion.

First, in a separate ruling, the trial judge had described the entire nine-month period after announcing her verdicts — the time she spent writing her reasons — as part of her “deliberation time”. The Court of Appeal drew a careful but crucial distinction. Deliberation is the process of reasoning toward a verdict. Writing reasons is meant to explain a verdict already reached — not to continue deciding it. A judge who is still deliberating after announcing a verdict raises exactly the concern the presumption of integrity is meant to guard against.

Second, as part of oral argument, Chris presented a colour-coded comparison of the trial judge's final reasons against her earlier ruling on a mid-trial motion. It showed that roughly 75 percent of the final reasons for judgment were identical or nearly identical to the earlier document. Much of the reasons, in other words, had already been written well before the verdict. That undercut the explanation that the sheer length of the reasons accounted for the delay — and suggested that the parts that took so long to produce were precisely the portions grappling with the defence's evidence and the contested issues in the case. To a reasonable observer, that pointed toward a judge still working through difficult questions after the verdict had been announced.

Weighing everything together, the Court held that the high bar for rebutting the presumption had been met. As the appellants put it in their written argument, as the seasons turned the trial judge repeatedly rescheduled appearances while she continued to write, and a reasonable person could not be confident she was merely recording reasoning already arrived at. Once the reasons could no longer be relied upon, the convictions could not stand on the bare verdict alone — a point the Crown did not dispute.

What This Means

For anyone who has been convicted after a trial, Qita is a reminder that the fairness of a criminal proceeding does not end when the verdict is announced. You are entitled to reasons that genuinely explain why you were found guilty, delivered within a reasonable time. Where a verdict is announced and the reasons follow only after a very long and unexplained delay, that delay can, in the right circumstances, become a ground of appeal in its own right.

If you are appealing a conviction — or concerned about how your trial was conducted, including delays in receiving reasons — these are exactly the kinds of issues that careful appellate review is designed to catch.