Hi, my name is Eric Kolotyluk, and I need funding to mount a challenge to Canada's "Pay to Prove Innocence" legal regime.

While I am requesting funding from Canada's Court Challenges Program and other sources, I also need significant funding for such a project, and it looks better to CCP if they are not the sole supporters.

This is important to me as an Accountability Journalist and Justice Reformer, who is concerned with holes in the ethics and morals of Canada's justice system.

The funds will be used to support my research, to hire qualified legal counsel, and related matters in making such a challenge to the justice and political system of Canada.

Canada’s criminal process nominally presumes an accused innocent, yet it assigns the economic risk of defending that innocence almost entirely to the defendant. Laying an information, calling police, or pressing charges is free or low-cost for complainants and the state, but the accused must immediately finance counsel retainers, expert reports, private investigation, bail conditions, and lost income. A 2021 national fee survey put the median one-day summary-offence trial at $4,286 and a three-to-five-day indictable trial (e.g., sexual assault) at $167,000 before HST and disbursements, with regional highs above $280 k. Hourly-rate reports forecast 4-7 % annual fee inflation through 2025, while federal criminal-legal-aid transfers for all ten provinces totalled only $202 million in 2023-24 (up from a $142 million base)—a figure that covers every duty-counsel hour, not just full defences. Shortfalls translate into self-representation: in 2024 31 % of Supreme Court leave-to-appeal applications were filed by unrepresented litigants.

The result is an asymmetrical cost structure in which the process itself becomes the punishment (Feeley, 1979); defendants risk bankruptcy for an acquittal, whereas the Crown and complainant risk nothing comparable. This economic imbalance distorts plea bargaining, limits evidentiary testing, and undermines public confidence in the presumption of innocence—constituting the core of the “pay-to-prove-innocence” problem.