SUPREME COURT'S ERROR ON SEARCHES

When the Supreme Court of Canada decided earlier this year in Regina
v. A.M. that principals could not call police at just any time to
search schools for drugs, the judicial majority in the decision
probably did not consider what might be hidden beyond illegal substances.

In addition, the same month (in April) in R. v. Kang Brown, when the
Supreme Court decided police do not possess a common law right to use
a sniffer dog to search a patron's duffel bag (outside of an
investigation based on reasonable and probable cause) -- and expect to
present what was found inside as evidence in court, the majority
probably did not consider that weapons on buses might become an issue
just months later.

This newspaper notes both decisions on schools and bus stations
because both are regrettably relevant this week.

In northern Ontario last Sunday, on a bus bound for Winnipeg, a
20-year-old man was stabbed in the chest by David Wayne Roberts, whom
Ontario police had arrested hours earlier for causing a disturbance.
They later released him, bought him a ticket for the bus ride and did
not search him. (Perhaps they feared such court action).

In Regina on Tuesday, a 16-year-old male student, recently expelled
from Luther College high school, returned on Tuesday with a firearm
during the school's chapel service and held students and staff hostage
while his letter was read out; his gun, a pellet pistol, was soon
wrested away from him by the principal.

Both incidents could have turned out far worse.

In the bus stabbing, the victim survived, but the incident mimics the
horrifying end of another man who was stabbed to death and beheaded on
a Greyhound bus in late July. In the high school incident, no shots
were fired and a pellet pistol is not a semi-automatic weapon. But
plenty of school shootings have turned out tragically.

Which brings us back to the Supreme Court and its rulings on privacy.
As described in R. v. Kang Brown, the police were on the lookout for
drug couriers from Vancouver at the Calgary Greyhound station in 2002
when they noticed the accused, Gurmakh Kang-Brown, who gave an officer
a long stare, went into the bus station lobby and turned to look back
at the officer, who found the behaviour rather suspicious.

The officer later approached the accused, identified himself, told him
he was not in any trouble and was free to go at any time; he did ask
the accused if he was carrying narcotics. The accused said no. The
officer then asked to look in the Kang-Brown's bag. The accused placed
his bag on the ground, began to unzip it, but pulled it away when the
officer went to touch the bag; the officer signalled another officer
with a sniffer dog to approach and the dog signalled the presence of
drugs.

The Supreme Court's opinion? It ruled the search did not meet the
standard of "reasonable and probable grounds" for it to be justified.

In Regina v. A.M., the principal of a Sarnia, Ont., high school who
attempted to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on drugs called police to
conduct a random search for drugs using sniffer dogs; they found a
substantial amount of marijuana in a student's knapsack in the gymnasium.

The Supreme Court opined that there were no reasonable grounds to
conduct the search, the evidence was inadmissible and the search
violated the privacy interests and constitutional rights of every
student in the school.

No reasonable grounds? High schools are hotbeds of drugs, not to
mention weapons, these days. The notion that privacy rights for
teenagers should outstrip the rights of other students, staff and
parents to a clean and safe school is the triumph of judicial naivete
over judicial sense.

As for privacy rights, bus stations (and schools) are public places;
the notion that police trained to look for suspicious behaviour cannot
be allowed to exercise that judgment and also call a sniffer dog to
check their hunches, is the triumph of abstract legalism over workable
police investigations.

The Court rulings would be objectionable enough on their own. With the
very recent reminders about schools, buses and weapons, such incidents
highlight how Supreme Court rulings handicap police and their efforts
to protect the public in what should be routine, justifiable and
allowable searches.

Why are airline passengers considered more important than bus
passengers or students for police protection? After the federal
election, new laws should be written to challenge the Supreme Court
and give police these reasonable search powers.

The Supreme Court is on occasion, and not without reason, accused of
being separated from the real world in its decisions. There is
validity in the accusation.