I'm going to start by just situating you with section 8 of the charter. It permits reasonable searches and seizures, in recognition of the fact that the state's legitimate interest in advancing enforcement goals remain consistent with privacy. It's a balancing exercise.
It's a two-part test.
The first one is whether there is a search at all. Was there a reasonable expectation of privacy? It's not complete privacy. It has to be a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The Spencer and Bykovets cases were on the first part. Was there a search at all? Before that, the case law was that there wasn't even a search. On the minimal intrusion, there was no reasonable expectation of privacy. The court is saying that now there is, folks.
You need to go to the next stage, which is, is it authorized by law? Is the law itself reasonable, and was the search conducted? Now we're in a new world, where we need the tool to be authorized by law.
In constructing this piece of legislation for your consideration, that's what we did. We said it has to be judicially authorized, and we're looking for a tool that's useful to officers. We already have all sorts of hammers, as it were, in the search world, but we need something tailored for officers to use at the beginning of an investigation, where we're not looking for evidence of an offence. We're actually just looking for information. It has to be tailored. It has to be narrow. It's going to be judicially authorized.
It's in that balancing, in that weighing of the reasonable grounds to suspect, which is used in all sorts of situations where things are tailored and the intrusion is minimal. That is the standard that's used in criminal law.
That's why that is put before you.
There is no lowering. Nothing's been lowered, because this is a new tool.
I hope that answers your question. I wanted to situate you in terms of section 8 more generally.