Sarnia contractor's $26K fraud yields house arrest, full restitution

For legal and RegTech professionals, the McMillan sentence is a case study in how Canadian courts operationalize restitution as a supervisory condition. Justice Mark Poland's order that the 33-year-old former contractor keep reporting to probation until all seven victims are repaid in full effectively converts a $26,000-plus fraud into an indefinite compliance obligation — a structure worth tracking as courts lean on conditional sentence orders with GPS monitoring for deposit-driven, trust-based fraud.

The sentencing of Kevin McMillan, a 33-year-old former Sarnia flooring contractor, marks a noteworthy outcome in a small-business fraud prosecution: one year of house arrest, a six-month curfew, GPS monitoring throughout both phases, two years of probation, and — most unusually — an open-ended probation-reporting requirement that does not lapse until every one of his seven victims has been repaid in full. McMillan pleaded guilty to multiple fraud counts arising from more than $26,000 in deposits he took between May and June 2024 through McMillan Flooring and More Inc., then failed to deliver flooring, offered false excuses for material and installation delays, ignored customer inquiries, and diverted the funds for personal use. Justice Mark Poland's sentencing remarks were unusually pointed, instructing McMillan that repayment 'is absolutely mandatory and must be priority No. 1' and that he 'ought to have no leisure time' until the victims are made whole.

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The single documented victim paid a certified cheque of just over $6,000 for flooring that was never ordered, suggesting the $26,000-plus total reflects a pattern of deposit-taking across multiple transactions rather than one large loss.

Under Canadian criminal law, fraud over $5,000 is an indictable offence under s. 380 of the Criminal Code carrying a maximum penalty of 14 years. The conditional sentence of imprisonment McMillan received is governed by s. 742.1, which permits a community-based sentence of less than two years where the offender does not pose a danger to the community and the disposition is consistent with sentencing principles. That a fraud exceeding $26,000 across seven complainants resulted in a conditional sentence rather than a custodial term reflects the mitigating factors typical of a first-offender disposition: a guilty plea, apparent acceptance of responsibility, and a restitution-focused plan. It also illustrates the bench's growing comfort with technologically supervised alternatives to incarceration — the order specifies GPS tracking during both the house-arrest and curfew phases.

A detail with doctrinal significance is that McMillan operated through an incorporated entity founded in 2020. Fraud prosecutions routinely pierce the corporate veil in substance, because s. 380 targets dishonest deprivation regardless of business form, and criminal liability attaches to the directing mind who converts customer funds. The case is a reminder that incorporation does not shield an owner-operator from personal criminal exposure when deposits are diverted for personal gain — a recurring risk in deposit-driven trades such as home renovations and flooring.