Critical Supreme Court Ruling to Decide Police Access to Private Text Messages

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Public is anxiously awaiting a Supreme Court ruling to be announced on Wednesday that will decide whether the police needs a search warrant or wiretap authority for monitoring cell phone text messages as part of criminal investigations. The impact of the decision will encompass more than billions of private texts sent each year by Canadian wireless customers.

Wireless giant, Telus, has appealed in court demanding that police shall be obligated  to at least acquire wiretap authorization for seizing private text messages from a customer’s mobile device. However, on the contrary, the federal government claims that such complication will choke the courts with several thousands of wiretap applications each year. The high profile case has stemmed from a warrant issued by the Ontario Superior Court to the police in Owen Sound, Ont., to collect texts from two customers of Telus. The warrant enforced the company to hand over the police a copy of the customers’ texts every day for two weeks, without even informing the respective customers.

Telus has now appealed the Supreme Court, after losing its initial bid to quash the warrant, that the police should at least acquire a wiretap authorization under the Criminal Code to seize private text messages. The lawyers argued that “the intrusion on a person’s privacy is identical whether the police surreptitiously listen in to your conversations while they are occurring or surreptitiously read copies of your private communications that are obtained directly from the means required for delivery of the communication.”