SUPREME COURT - BACKPACKS AND SEARCHES

If police officers were allowed to drop in on quiet house parties,
snoop around backyard patios or search the private vehicles and
backpacks of people at random and without cause, an awful lot of
upstanding citizens would likely find themselves getting pinched for
minor drug crimes.

But police generally need a warrant to search our homes and our purses
and briefcases and that same protection should extend to the backpacks
of students. Kids should have constitutional rights too, whether they
are in school or at the shopping mall.

Sarnia police didn't think so when they accepted an invitation from a
principal to lock down and scour a school with a drug sniffing dog,
even though there were no grounds for a warrant let alone any direct
knowledge of drugs inside. Police confined students in their
classrooms for an extended period, piled their backpacks into a corner
and brought in the dog. This fishing expedition landed police a guppy
-- a 17-year-old student who allegedly had marijuana and magic
mushrooms in his backpack.

A lower court judge acquitted the teen, arguing, sensibly, that the
search violated his and other students' constitutional rights. That
ruling was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal last year, with the
judges calling the incident "a warrantless, random search with the
entire student body held in detention."

The Supreme Court of Canada heard submissions on this important
personal privacy case Tuesday and is expected to issue a ruling by the
fall. Hopefully, the court will come down on the side of privacy
rights and avoid expanding upon the dangerous precedent it laid down
in a case involving a Kingsville man.

The upper court ruled in 2004 that police were allowed to use infrared
technology to scan for heat sources -- an indication of potential
marijuana grow operations -- in the homes of the nation. While the
ruling represented a blow to privacy rights, the court confined its
judgment to that specific technology and affirmed the importance of
reining in police powers.

"Few things are as important to our way of life as the amount of power
allowed the police to invade the homes, privacy and even the bodily
integrity of members of Canadian society without judicial
authorization," wrote Justice Ian Binney.

Crown lawyers in the Sarnia case maintain the lockdown wasn't a search
because there is no privacy protection afforded to smells in public
air. That logic doesn't hold because the dog specifically targeted the
students' backpacks. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association
maintains those backpacks are "like a portable study and bedroom all
rolled into one" and should be reasonably protected.

"There isn't any reason why a 17-year-old girl shouldn't have the same
expectation of privacy in her backpack that a 21-year-old woman does
in her handbag or a 35-year-old man does in his briefcase," said
association lawyer Jonathan Lisus.

"Students spend so much of their time in a school environment and one
of the life lessons you should learn in school is that you are not
going to be locked up and searched by the police when no one believes
you have done anything wrong."

Kids shouldn't do drugs and they certainly shouldn't carry them to
school in their bags along with their textbooks. Teen drug use is a
problem but the solution should revolve around education -- not the
violation of their constitutional rights and the erosion of ours.

Warrantless searches of our public schools should be done only as a
last resort and only if there is a threat of impending harm.
Conducting a fishing expedition on a lark to see if any kids are
experimenting with drugs hardly qualifies. Police in this case said it
would have been a "fruitless exercise" to try and obtain a search
warrant. There's a reason for that.

There was no cause and the court should rule the search and seizure,
and others like it, unreasonable and unconstitutional.