R. v. Ha: Upholding General Warrants Without Asking the Right Questions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To date, in considering general warrants, courts have been failing even to think about a distinction which ought to be seen as essential. The distinction arises in connection with the requirement in section 487.01 (l)(c) of the Criminal Code that a general warrant is only available when no other provision in any statute could authorize the search. In R. v. Ha, reported ante p. 24, the Ontario Court of Appeal notes that:\nThe simple fact is that there is no provision in the Code, the CDSA, or in any other federal statute that would authorize an unlimited number of covert entries and searches on private property over a two-month period.\nThat is perfectly true. It is quite possible, however, that the reason it is true is that Parliament has decided that there ought not to be a power to conduct "an unlimited number of covert entries and searches on private property over a two month period." Courts have so far been failing even to consider the possibility that the reason some of these powers do not exist is because Parliament has decided that they should not exist.\nThe distinction which so far has not been given attention in the case law is between searches which are not authorized by any provision because they are of an unanticipated type, and those which are not authorized by any provision because they were anticipated and were deliberately ruled out. One would think, for example, that in setting minimum standards for physical searches of a place in section 487 (standards which correspond to the constitutional minimum, according to Hunter v. Southam Inc.), Parliament has stated quite clearly that physical searches based on less justification than that contained in those standards are not authorized. The question, is this type of search allowed? would not be an unanticipated question: it would be one that was anticipated and answered in the negative. To allow the general warrant provision to authorize both unanticipated and deliberately excluded searches is to ignore a crucial distinction.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.033 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.006 |
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".