Common Law Police Powers and Exclusion of Evidence: The Renaissance of Good Faith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian courts have become far more willing in recent years to rely on the common law as a source of new police powers. Where once the test from R. v. Waterfield was an exception and an afterthought to what was otherwise the general rule of insistence upon statutory sources for police powers, more recently that test seems to be in the forefront of judges' minds as they decide cases. That 1963 British decision has been cited by Canadian courts roughly as often in the last eight years as in the first 35 years after it was decided. Since 1999 the Supreme Court of Canada has relied on Waterfield to create three new common law powers: in R. v. Godoy with regard to entering an apartment to investigate a disconnected 911 call, and twice in R. v. Mann, first to authorize investigative detentions, and secondly to authorize a limited power to search during an investigative detention.\nThis article will not focus on whether greater reliance on common law police powers is in itself a good or bad thing, though that is certainly a real debate. Rather, the focus of this article will be on the corresponding impact of this greater reliance on the issue of the exclusion of evidence following a Charter violation. In particular, it will be argued here that the increase in the use of common law police powers creates a reciprocal obligation to supervise the use of those powers after the fact. This in turn requires a subtle shift in the understanding of "good faith" in the s. 24(2) analysis, a shift which can be seen to be starting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.047 | 0.085 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.182 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".