CIPPIC Granted leave to Intervene in Telus v. The Queen

CIPPIC has been granted leave to intervene before the Supreme Court of Canada in Telus Communications Company v. Her Majesty the Queen, SCC No. 34252. The case involves the application of the general warrant power in order to force TELUS to hand over text messages not yet in its possession. TELUS' appeal challenges the use of general warrants in a manner that effectively amounts to an 'interception' and bypasses the special protections provided for 'interceptions' in Part VI of the Criminal Code, while the government argued that, since TELUS stores text messages on its servers for a number of weeks, access to these messages should not be considered a 'real-time interception'.

In its motion for leave to intervene, CIPPIC argued that law enforcement should not be permitted to bypass important privacy safeguards designed to protect Canadian communications against unauthorized interception. The purpose of Part VI Criminal Code protections is to ensure that police can not leverage the mechanisms by which private communications are delivered to spy on Canadians unless there is strong reason to do so and other methods have been tried and have failed. Text messages are cached as part of the communications delivery process and caching, in general, is widely used in Internet transactions. If courts permitted superfluous caching to defeat the special protections provided against interception, it could have wide-ranging implications for the privacy of online interactions.