Friday, April 25, 2008
Privacy
Good decision on privacy rights from the Supreme Court this morning. They ruled that searches of bags in public places based only on police being alerted by drug sniffing dogs are unconstitutional. The searches in question breached the protection from unreasonable search and seizure under s. 8 of the Charter. The actual decisions (there were two decisions released together) are here and here.
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Just a quick note to point out something that may be relevant when the next justice is picked by Harper: this decision was written by Justice Binnie, who is the only sitting Supreme Court Justice who was appointed straight from private practice, as a corporate-commercial litigator from McCarthy Tetrault. It is possible that the next justice may also be appointed from private practice since the pool of appellate judges and academics in the Altantic provinces is relatively small (in number - not a comment on the quality of jurists in the maritimes since i know nothing about any of them). I think a reasonable reaction to an appointment of a corporate litigator to the bench by a conservative PM would be that the appointment is intended to provide a conservative ideological ally. and while that may be the case from Harper's point of view, i would just point out based on justice Binnie's record that the fact that someone comes from a business law background is not necessarily helpful is predicting that person's view on the scope of charter rights in this country.
this is huge for vancouver
i actually have never even seen a drug sniffing dog in public in vancouver or anywhere else. the only place i've ever seen them is the secured areas of airports (which are not covered by this decision). but there are two cases here where it happened, so apparently they are out there.
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