I was ticketed during 2019 for a minor offence in my neighbourhood. I requested a court hearing at the time and had an original court date set in the spring of 2020. Of course this coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when almost all provincial services have decided to shutdown to adhere to the pandemic closure.
Throughout the remaining months of 2020 there were many emails and phone calls with the court services for me to find out the rescheduled date. After more than three follow up calls and many emails I finally received a “virtual” court date for March 17, 2021, earlier this month.
Let me detail my experience of my traffic offence virtual hearing. Hopefully you will find this useful in case you have to go through a similar event.
The meeting was conducted with Zoom. I have used Zoom before so I was pretty comfortable with the format and functionality. I joined the meeting 15 minutes prior to my scheduled court appearance. After waiting for a couple of minutes a prosecutor appeared and pre-registered me and briefed me to what will happen. The most important information is to mute your mic when you are not talking, and unmute when you are talking. I also had to remind myself to address the “Justice of the Peace” as your Worship.
I learned something new with Zoom during the session. Zoom has the ability to create rooms and the prosecutor can move individuals from one room to another. When I first joined Zoom, I was automatically sent to a virtual waiting room. Once the court room is made available, I was then transferred to the virtual court room. I thought this was a pretty good coordination and worked very well.
Once in the court room, the experience is pretty standard. You get to hear in great detail all of the other hearings that were scheduled with the same court room. There were more than 10 other individuals that were scheduled within the same time slot. I had to wait for about 40 minutes before I was called up by the prosecutor. Her Worship was very friendly and accommodating and my session did not take more than 10 minutes to conclude our business.
We reached a mutually agreeable arrangement, and I proceeded to pay my offence on paytickets.ca the next day. Overall it was good to get this monkey off my back without having to visit a physical court during the pandemic. The experience was more streamlined than I thought, so kudos to the Ontario Court Services.