Dog Days (UPDATE)

(UPDATE) The court has ruled;

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that police cannot use scent-tracking canines for random searches in public places, including schools, parks, malls and bus terminals.

The decisions would put an end to the commonplace practice of random sweeps with sniffer dogs, especially to detect illegal drugs.

“No doubt, ordinary businessmen and businesswomen, riding along on public transit, or going up and down on elevators in office towers, will be outraged at any suggestion that the content of their briefcases could be randomly inspected by the police without any ‘reasonable suspicion’ of illegality,” the court said in a 6-3 written judgement.

Well done!!

Image via WikipediaTwo dog stories in the news today, both dealing with injustice.

First the Supreme Court of Canada will rule today on “whether the use of a drug-sniffing police dog during a random search of a southwestern Ontario school constitutes a reasonable search”.{CBC News}

This stems from an incident in Ontario where acting on an invitation from the school, officers and school officials confined students to their classrooms and placed all backpacks in the school gym to be sniffed out by police dogs.

With any luck they will rule against this practise. As a believer in social justice and as a mother it both sickens and saddens me that my children ( and all children ) are seen to have no right to privacy or from unreasonable search and seizure the moment they enter school property. Years of emphasis on policing rather than education, has not shown to have increased the likehood of a good school experience or education in schools in America. It is unlikely to have any better an outcome here.

The second dog story involves bureaucrats deciding life and death on the basis of income. {CTV News}

Four dogs got out of the house on the day in question – a Sunday. Even now, Nash testified, she has no idea how it happened. A farmer just outside town called her to say the dogs were on the loose. Tarr eventually came home, the others did not.

They turned up trying to get into the kitchen of a local restaurant. Animal control officer Leanne Shirkey happened to be at the restaurant that morning. Shirkey testified the dogs were a little dirty but very friendly. She loaded them into her truck and took the dogs to the pound, which was at the town garage.

Shirkey testified that town administrator Gail Blaney and others appeared to know the dogs belonged to Nash, but they didn’t want Shirkey to contact her.

“They said, she’s poor, she doesn’t deserve these dogs,” Shirkey recalled. “It was implied that she didn’t have a job and that her financial situation was not sufficient to care for these dogs.”

Shirkey said she offered to notify Nash, but was told that wasn’t her job. She asked if she should try to find alternate homes for the dogs, but was told that an appointment had been made to have them put down on Thursday.

This case has yet to be proven, however, if officials put these animals down either because they didn’t like the woman in question or because of her financial status it should give us all a chill.

What can they take from us next?
Of course this thought process has precedent;

Rainer Knopff, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said the program was “a biased boondoggle that had gone well past its `best before’ date.”

The program only funded groups on “one side” of the political spectrum while “socially conservative groups never got any money. Not a penny, as far as I know,” said Knopff.
He also echoed then-Treasury Board president John Baird’s suggestion, made in defending the decision to kill the program, that it made no sense for Ottawa to spend public money helping groups challenge its own legislation.
“I don’t want to pay for surrogate litigants,” said Knopff, arguing public interest groups should raise their own money for Charter cases. “If they can’t raise the money – tough.”