Case information

Public international law — Mutual legal assistance — Search and seizure — Sending order — Minister of Justice approving request for search from foreign state conducting criminal investigation — Whether judge erred in imposing evidentiary burden upon applicant to impugn Minister’s purported approval of search — Whether delegate of Minister can extend judicially authorized search to location not initially requested and not approved by Minister — Where evidence of purported extension of search was created years after execution of search, whether hearing judge erred in failing to order disclosure, misapprehending evidence and improperly applying test for disclosure from R. v. Larosa (2002), 166 C.C.C. (3d) 449.

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.

PacNet Services Ltd. was an international payment processing service provider headquartered in British Columbia. PacNet and DeepCove Laboratories Inc., the corporation which held PacNet’s proprietary software, are alleged to have processed payments induced by fraudulent mass-mailed solicitations. Authorities in the United States initiated a criminal investigation into this mailing scheme.

In August 2016, Canada’s Minister of Justice approved a request made by the United States pursuant to the Treaty Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters to search the offices of PacNet and DeepCove in Vancouver and to deliver the results to the United States. Following an application by the Attorney General of Canada in September 2016, search warrants for the two companies’ offices were authorized. The subsequent searches revealed that PacNet stored additional business records at a storage facility operated by Butler Box & Storage Inc. In October 2016, the Attorney General made further applications for an evidence-gathering order requiring Butler to produce the records stored by PacNet at its facility and for a warrant authorizing a search of the boxes of records obtained from the Butler facility; both applications were granted.

In October 2024, the two companies filed an application seeking to set aside the October 2016 orders authorizing the gathering and search of PacNet’s boxes stored at the Butler facility. In the application, they opposed the sending of any materials from those boxes to the United States. Later in October 2024, PacNet filed a further application for disclosure of documents pertaining to the Minister’s approval of the search for and seizure of the materials stored at the Butler facility. In February 2025, a judge dismissed PacNet’s application for disclosure and, pursuant to ss. 15 and 20 of the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, granted an application by the Attorney General for a sending order authorizing the transmittal of the materials seized from the Butler facility to the United States. PacNet sought to appeal this decision to the Court of Appeal for British Columbia, which dismissed the application for leave to appeal.