An Act to amend the Criminal Code to address the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Jordan

This bill writes into the Criminal Code the timing rules that the Supreme Court of Canada created in its 2016 R. v. Jordan decision about an accused person's right to be tried within a reasonable time. Right now those rules exist only as court-made guidance; this bill would make them formal law.

Specifically, it sets a hard time limit ("ceiling") between when charges are laid and when a trial actually or is expected to end: 30 months for cases in superior court, and 18 months for cases in provincial court. If a case takes longer than that, the judge must stay the proceedings (essentially stopping the prosecution) unless the Crown prosecutor can show the delay was reasonable because of exceptional circumstances. Delays caused by the defence, or delays the defence agrees to waive, don't count toward these limits.

The bill also creates an exception: these time limits do not apply to "primary designated offences" (a category defined elsewhere in the Criminal Code, generally serious offences such as certain sexual and violent crimes tied to DNA-order provisions). Because removing the time-limit protection for these offences could otherwise conflict with the Charter right to trial within a reasonable time (section 11(b)), the bill formally invokes the Charter's "notwithstanding" clause (section 33) to shield that exception from being struck down on that basis.

This bill adds provisions to the Criminal Code setting fixed time ceilings — 30 months for superior court trials, 18 months for provincial court trials — beyond which a judge must stay criminal proceedings unless the prosecutor proves exceptional circumstances, and it exempts "primary designated offences" from these ceilings by invoking the Charter's notwithstanding clause.

• Who must act — a superior court judge or provincial court judge is required ("must stay proceedings") to halt a prosecution once the applicable time ceiling is exceeded, unless the prosecutor rebuts this.
• Prosecutor's discretionary burden — the Crown can avoid a stay by demonstrating "exceptional circumstances," a term left undefined in the bill, leaving its meaning to judicial interpretation case by case.
• Delay attribution — time caused solely or directly by the defence, or waived by the defence, is excluded from the calculation of the ceiling, giving courts discretion to assess what counts as defence-caused delay.
• Exemption for certain offences — the ceilings do not apply to "primary designated offences" (as defined elsewhere in the Code, relating to offences eligible for DNA data bank orders), meaning no time-based stay right applies to that category under this section.
• Charter override — the bill invokes section 33(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the notwithstanding clause) to declare that the exemption for primary designated offences operates despite section 11(b) of the Charter (the right to trial within a reasonable time), and such a declaration is subject to Parliament's own renewal rules under section 33, not to judicial override.
• Oversight — the text contains no reporting requirement, review mechanism, or sunset clause for these provisions; a notwithstanding declaration under section 33 lapses after five years unless re-enacted by Parliament.