The police wiretap a landline in a lounge because they suspect that a drug dealer uses it for business. A waitress uses the lounge phone to call an abortion clinic to make an appointment. The police wiretap a pay phone at a local gym because they believe a murder suspect ...
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On September 30, 2013, the Prime Minister announced the nomination of Mr. Justice Marc Nadon, a supernumerary judge of the Federal Court of Appeal, to the Supreme Court of Canada. On October 3, 2013, by Order in Council, Justice Nadon was named a judge of the court, replacing Justice Morris ...
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In the second part of this series of posts on trends in wiretap law I concluded by saying there were judicial limitations on the ability of defendants to challenge the admissibility of wiretap evidence in court. I will pick up that discussion here. First, if you are following this series ...
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In the first part of this series of posts on trends in wiretap law I said that over the last thirty years there has been an expansion of state intrusion into the personal sphere of the individual that is vivid in the context of electronic surveillance. I will talk about ...
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Canadians value their privacy both individually and collectively. We may not protect our privacy like my parents did in a social sense and we have surrendered much to the surveillance camera but in 1982 the nation found the political will to patriate its constitution and entrench our rights in it ...
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In 1974 Parliament enacted Part IV.1 [now Part VI] of the Criminal Code known as the Protection of Privacy Act. 1 The legislation was a response to wiretapping by the police that was unsupervised by Parliament or the judiciary. 2 The exclusionary rule was contained in s. 178.16(1) of the Act ...
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In an important ruling released on March 27, 2013,  the Supreme Court of Canada held that text messages are private communications that are protected by Part VI of the Criminal Code. In a case reported as R. v. Telus Communications Co., 2013 SCC 16 the police wanted to seize text ...
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In an important judgment released on January 17, 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada clarified the constitutional requirements of police searches conducted to ensure the safety of the police or the public. In R. v. MacDonald, 2014 SCC 3 two police officers had gone to the appellant's Halifax condo as ...
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The four defendants in a wiretap case I have before Justice Brian R. Burrows in the Court of Queen's Bench, at Edmonton, brought evidence suppression motions regarding historic text messages seized by the police from a telephone service provider. The Crown Attorneys brought counter applications for declarations that the defendants' ...
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In 1979 five men and a woman were charged with conspiracy to traffic marijuana in Edmonton, Alberta. Wiretap evidence was new and central to the state’s case. I had been practicing in Alberta for only two years. The closest I had come to a wiretap was watching Francis Ford Coppola’s ...
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