Police monitored the smartphone of a Montreal journalist in what his newspaper and media lawyers call a gross attack on freedom of the press.
A police special investigations unit obtained at least 24 warrants from a justice of the peace for the cellphone of Patrick Lagacé, a columnist at the French-language newspaper La Presse. This enabled investigators to get the phone numbers for people with whom he exchanged phone calls and text messages, and to track the reporter’s whereabouts.
‘Totally unprecedented,’ says lawyer
“This is totally unprecedented,” says media lawyer Mark Bantey, one of several to denounce the police surveillance. “I’ve never seen anything like this in the 35 years I’ve been practicing law.”
A long-standing decision by the Supreme Court of Canada means that judges must be very careful in granting warrants against reporters. “Whenever a judge sees that a warrant is aimed at a journalist or a media outlet, lights should light up in his head,” says Bantey.
“He has to take into consideration that media play a very important role in a democratic society. And before issuing the warrant a judge has to be convinced that there are no other possible sources for the information and if there are other sources, that those sources have been exhausted.”
Bantey says there are other ways police could have obtained the information which was part of an investigation into one of its own officers. Lagacé himself told Radio-Canada he is convinced this was an attempt to intimidate anyone in the police force who may want to speak with a journalist.
A free press ‘fundamental’ to democracy
La Presse went to court to quash the warrants and Bantey says it could seek damages. He adds Canadian society should definitely be worried about this case because “a free press is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Without a free press, we’re not a democracy.”
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