Case information

Criminal law — Charter of Rights — Arbitrary detention — Racial profiling — Legal test — Evidence — Convictions for serious firearms, drug and proceeds of crime offences — Whether the trial judge erred in law by improperly assessing racial profiling claim.<br><br>

Case summaries are prepared by the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (Law Branch). Please note that summaries are not provided to the Judges of the Court. They are placed on the Court file and website for information purposes only.

At trial, the appellant was convicted of serious firearms, drug and proceeds of crime offences. Evidence was obtained because of a search that was incidental to his arrest following a stop for a minor traffic offence. The appellant filed an application asserting the police had violated his rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms when detaining and arresting him including that he was a victim of racial profiling. The trial judge dismissed the Charter claim, finding, amongst other, that there was “no evidence” of racial profiling in the case.

The appellant appealed his convictions, restricting the appeal to the issue of whether his rights under s. 9 of the Charter were violated. A majority of the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. It held the trial judge gave cogent and comprehensive reasons for finding that the appellant’s detention and arrest were lawful. The majority also disagreed with the appellant’s arguments that the trial judge applied the wrong test for racial profiling and that the trial judge conflated the issue of racial profiling with the question of Charter compliance. The majority held that the appellant demonstrated no palpable and overriding error in the trial judge’s finding of fact that there was no evidence of racial profiling in the circumstances of the case.

In dissent, Schwann J.A. would have allowed the appeal, set aside the appellant’s convictions and ordered a new trial. She disagreed with the majority’s conclusion on the issue of racial profiling. In her view, the trial judge erred in law as he did not grasp the applicable test to determine whether the police officers’ actions were affected or motivated by racial profiling. This error led him to view the appellant’s argument through the lens of a conventional Charter and credibility analysis. Further, although there was some circumstantial evidence from which an inference of racial profiling could have been drawn, the trial judge never turned his mind to the question of whether such an inference could be drawn from it. The analysis was therefore incomplete.