SUPREME COURT SLAPS MUZZLES ON SNIFFER DOGS

OTTAWA - There will likely be a lot fewer scent-sniffing dogs
routinely sticking their noses in public places following a Supreme
Court of Canada ruling yesterday that tightened the leash on police
powers to use the canines for random sweeps.

In its first pronouncement on sniffer dogs, the court sided 6-3 with a
high-school student from Sarnia, Ont., and a Vancouver man who was
caught with cocaine in his luggage at a Calgary bus terminal.

"We're no longer going to be able to show up and randomly search,"
said Tom Stamatakis, vice-president of the Canadian Police
Association.

In both cases, police violated the charter right against unreasonable
search and seizure by allowing their dogs to embark on general sniff
searches of a school and bus depot without more concrete reasons to
suspect drugs were present, the Supreme Court said.

The two rulings are expected to end routine searches in public places
like schools and bus and train stations. The decisions, however, are
silent on airports, where police dogs routinely sniff the luggage of
passengers entering the country.

Past Supreme Court rulings have established that privacy rights are
lower when weighed against the need to secure the borders, prompting
speculation that sniffer dogs will continue to be used at airports.

"It's fair to say the decisions wouldn't apply to airports," predicted
Brent Olthuis, a lawyer for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association,
noting that neither case involved matters of border security.

In the meantime, perhaps the biggest impact of the rulings will be in
the nation's schools, where officials in some jurisdictions often call
in police and their dogs to conduct searches without any information
on a specific threat.

Schools in the St. Clair district routinely invited police and their
sniffer dogs to root out drugs until a teen identified as A.M.
challenged the practice following his arrest on drug charges at St.
Patrick's Catholic High School in 2002.

During the search, students were confined in their classrooms for
almost two hours while police searched the school, including backpacks
piled in a corner of the gymnasium. After a signal from a sniffer dog
named Chief, police zeroed in on one backpack, in which they found 10
bags of marijuana, 10 magic mushrooms and assorted drug
paraphernalia.

The Supreme Court majority said that the sniff search violated A.M's
rights, saying that students are entitled to the same expectation of
privacy in their backpacks as adults are in their purses or briefcases.

The majority rejected the Crown's argument 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.

The court also ruled 6-3 in favour of Gurmakh Kang-Brown, who was
caught with 17 ounces cocaine in his luggage after RCMP conducted a
random search with a sniffer dog, Chevy, at the Calgary bus depot six
years ago.