HIGH COURT COULD SNUFF OUT USE OF SNIFFING DOGS

OTTAWA - A case that started with a dog named Chief trying to sniff
out drugs at an Ontario high school culminates in a Supreme Court of
Canada ruling today on whether police can use scent-tracking canines
for random searches in public places, including schools, parks,
malls, airports and bus terminals.

"This has far-reaching implications way past schools," said Paul
Wubben, director of education for the St. Clair Catholic District
School Board in southern Ontario, where principals routinely call
police to bring in sniffer dogs to help rid schools of drugs.

At issue in the Supreme Court is whether sniffer dogs are an invasion
of privacy that amount to unreasonable search and seizure under the
Charter of Rights. The court will hand down rulings in two separate
cases that have sparked enormous commentary and speculation in legal
circles in the absence of any clear Canadian law.

The decisions could put an end to random sweeps with sniffer dogs,
which are commonplace in Canadian schools, airports and train and bus stations.

In the case that has attracted the most attention, the court will
decide whether police in Sarnia, Ont., violated the student body's
constitutional rights by bringing a scent-tracking dog into St.
Patrick's High School in November 2002.

The police, who had received a standing invitation from the
principal, acknowledged in earlier court proceedings that they were
not acting on a tip, they had no reason to believe student safety was
threatened and it would have been a "fruitless exercise" to try to
obtain a search warrant.

Students were confined in their classrooms for almost two hours while
police searched the school. After a signal from Chief, police zeroed
in on one backpack, in which they found 10 bags of marijuana, 10
magic mushrooms and assorted drug paraphernalia.

A student identified as A.M., who was 17 years old at the time, was
criminally charged, but later cleared by two Ontario courts on the
grounds that police had violated his charter rights.

The Crown, which is leading the charge against A.M., contends that no
search took place because the dog was only sniffing the public air
and tipped off police to a trouble spot, giving them "reasonable"
suspicion to believe that drugs were present -- an accepted bar for
conducting searches.

"A dog sniff alone is not a search," the Ontario attorney general
said in a court brief. "It only supplies information that may lead to one."

Wubben said that the appearance of police and their sniffer dogs acts
as a deterrent.

The Crown asserts that a ruling in favour of A.M. could also have
serious ramifications for the future of police dogs to help save
lives by detecting explosives during random police patrols.