FISHING ON BC FERRIES

When 12 plainclothes police officers and five drug dogs rode the B.C.
Ferries this week between Horseshoe Bay and Nanaimo, everything was done by
the book.

West Vancouver police obtained search warrants for the two cars actually
checked for illegal drugs. The seizure of seven kilograms of marijuana and
the arrest of three people was all legal, according to police.

Operation High Seas, as it was known, raises some red flags with civil
libertarians, who claim police have no right to "troll" for prospective
lawbreakers. The fear is that next police will be taking their dogs to
shopping centre parking lots, conducting spot checks on highways, or even
sniffing vehicles in private driveways.

The police claim they have long had reason to suspect that B.C. Ferries are
routinely used to transport large quantities of drugs. This week's
operation, the second such executed by the department, was designed to
intercept that sort of traffic.

Once their dogs identified a vehicle, police used those "hits'" to obtain
search warrants via fax and telephone from a justice of the peace service
centre on the Lower Mainland. This is much different from randomly stopping
and searching cars without warrants, they say.

And it is also much different from searching homes or driveways, because the
ferries are considered part of the highway system and are public places,
they say.

Police consider Tuesday's operation a "very successful one". They plan to do
it again. But many would describe this sort of policing as intrusive, even
chilling. It conjures up images of police states, with guards standing at
checkpoints, tersely demanding, "Your papers, please.''

Random police checks in public places -- and that's what this was -- are
acceptable to most people if they centre around an issue of public safety.
Stopping cars checking for drunk drivers or setting up roadblocks to search
for an abducted child or armed prison escapees on the run would qualify.

But this was not a safety issue. And even if this sort of police mission is
legal, it begs a question: in times of cutbacks, do we really want to use
our valuable policing resources on a B.C. Ferries fishing expedition?