COP FERRY TRIPS WERE LEGAL

In the case of news, one should wait for the sacrament of confirmation. -
Voltaire

From time to time in this space I've criticized the West Vancouver Police
Department (WVPD).

But at this writing - unless I too haven't waited long enough for
Voltaire's "sacrament of confirmation" - I think our town's police got what
I believe the lurid Yankee TV sitcop (sic) programs call "a bad rap" for
their recent arrests in which they used dogs to sniff marijuana in vehicles
on ferries.

John Dixon, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and long-time
collaborator with his fellow Capilano College instructor Stan Persky in
pushing homosexual political causes, was predictably scathing. Dixon
perceived an outrageous abuse of police power after the WVPD and other
police rode the ferries with trained dogs and homed in on several cars,
seized seven kilograms of marijuana, and made three arrests.

This, Dixon declared on the Rafe Mair radio show last week, was a police
"fishing expedition" and a clear violation of Chapter 8 of the Secular
Scriptures of Canada, the Charter of Rights. It appears that your vehicle
has the same status as your home: Police cannot enter it without a search
warrant, and they cannot obtain a search warrant unless they can convince a
judge or justice of the peace that they have sufficient reason to believe
that the occupants may have committed or are committing an offence.

Old lawyer Rafe, buoyant with the renewal of his CKNW contract, warmly
joined Dixon in vilifying the police for trampling on this precious right.

I confess this wicked thought traipsed through my mind: Would Dixon have
sprinted to extol this right if, say, a police "fishing expedition" had
ensnared a number of Alabama rednecks with rifles and ammo hidden under
their pickups and worshipful snapshots of Adolf in their wallets? Or, God
forbid, persons of certain ethnic characteristics conveying destructive
ingredients across our peaceful waters - i.e., terrorists?

I admit to some ignorance of whether a road vehicle has exactly the same
status as one's home. In my naughty youth, police unhesitatingly shone
flashlights into cars parked in popularly designated Lovers' Lanes and, if
intoxicating liquors were found therein, did not treat the car in the
spirit of "a man's home is a man's castle." On the contrary, the car was
deemed a public place and an open bottle of booze an offence.

Perhaps the learned Dixon could answer this question that puzzles me:
Suppose the educated dogs had sniffed the bud in the saddle bag of a
three-speed Raleigh bicycle. Does a bicycle, too, have the status of one's
home, and could the police open the bag only with a properly executed
search warrant? Have the Solons of the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on
that? Dixon went much further. He implicitly and trendily scoffed at such
generic police activity, stating that there are 700 marijuana grow-ops in
Vancouver and comparing the current social attitude toward the drug to hard
drinking during Prohibition - the argument that everybody's doing it, so
the law must be a bad one. (The older I get the more I wonder if
Prohibition has got an undeserved bad name, considering the devastation
drink caused, especially to working men who left weeping wives and hungry
children at home while they got hammered on payday.)

Dixon's stance naturally makes a welcome appeal to (a) persons of his own
drug-happy 1960ish generation which is now in power, and (b) students of
his college milieu, who like all youths since time began have known that
the old folks have it all wrong and the world must be remade. But the point
is that the search warrant issue that Dixon raised became what I believe
the lawyers call moot, when the West Vancouver police announced they did
indeed have warrants for their searches on the low seas - telephone
warrants, properly obtained from a justice of the peace ashore. Which
rather took the wind out of Dixon's and other critics' sails.

Where the West Van and many other police departments can be faulted is in
their common attitude of "we'll let the press and public know when we're
good and ready to let them know." My attendance at a couple of West
Vancouver police board meetings hasn't lessened this impression.