COURT DECISION WON'T SNUFF POT PROGRAM, WATTS INSISTS

SURREY - B.C.'s appeals court has struck down Surrey's anti-grow op
inspection program, but Mayor Dianne Watts says the campaign will go on.

In a unanimous ruling released Thursday, a five-member panel ruled
Surrey's Electrical Fire Safety Inspection program violates Section 8
of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Watts said the city will not
abandon its crackdown on grow ops.

"We may have to alter the way we do this. We'll adapt to the court
ruling and carry on."

The program was instituted in 2004 to combat the rapid spread of
marijuana grow ops in Surrey. Teams made up of electrical and fire
inspectors, bylaw officers and police would check residences with
unusually high electrical consumption, a condition common to grow ops.

Residents were given 72-hour notice of an impending inspection. If
they agreed to allow access to the home, police would do a
walk-through to make sure the home was safe for the inspectors, then
the safety team would check that safety standards were met.

Police officers were excluded from the inspection teams following a
2008 B.C. Supreme Court ruling that found fault with the practice.
Now the entire program has been called into question.

Chief Justice Lance Finch wrote that the home sits at the top of a
"hierarchy of places" in which people have a reasonable expectation
of privacy. The inspections carried out by the EFSI teams, he held,
cross the line.

"While the impugned inspections in this case are regulatory in
nature, they constitute a considerable intrusion into an individual's
reasonable expectation of privacy," Finch wrote.

The court ruled an administrative warrant requiring the demonstration
of reasonable grounds to show regulatory standards are not being met
should be required before inspectors are permitted to enter a private
residence.

Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis said the ruling isn't a big hurdle to
continuing a program he said is beneficial to public safety. A small
number of administrative warrants were necessary to conduct
inspections in the past, he said.

"We go to a Justice of the Peace and get a warrant. We use the
evidence that we use to decide on an inspection for the warrant. If
that standard remains unchanged, then we shouldn't have any problems."