Are public school teachers protected from unreasonable search and seizure by section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms if the search and seizure is performed in the workplace by their employers?
As stated by the Court of Appeal for Ontario in the case of Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario v. York Region District School Board, 2022 ONCA 476, “There is no doubt that they are.”
Is deleting your browser history, so as to attempt to conceal the fact that you had visited "adult" websites, in the face of a court order to "preserve all records relevant to a lawsuit" “spoliation” of evidence?
That was one of the questions that the Honourable Mr. Justice Frank J. C. Newbould of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice was asked to resolve in the case of Catalyst Capital Group Inc. v Moyse, 2016 ONSC 5271.
Can an employer be held legally responsible if one of its employees deliberately invades upon the privacy of the employer’s customers? That question was one of the key issues in the recently decided class action certification motion in Evans v. The Bank of Nova Scotia, 2014 ONSC 2135 (CanLII).
The case involves a class action proceeding against the Bank of Nova Scotia and one of its former employees for breaching the privacy of the Bank’s customers.
The case was filed in Ottawa and the certification motion was decided by the Honourable Mr. Justice Robert Smith of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, sitting at Ottawa.
Sean Bawden, editor and primary author of this blog, formerly worked with plaintiff’s counsel and assisted in the formative stages of the case before transferring to Kelly Santini.
While the court did not expressly say that the answer to the question raised at the start of this post was “yes,” it did expressly refuse to say that the answer to the question is “no.”
Do employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in employer-provided technology?
In an update to my earlier post Employees’ Rights to Privacy with Work Equipment, on October 19, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada has released its decision in the case of R. v. Cole, 2012 SCC 53.
The case answers the question of whether an employee can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in employer-provided technology.
Employers often have the actual ability to access their employees’ private email accounts. But do they have the legal right to do so?
Providing employees with mobile technology, such as smart phones, laptop computers, tablets, etc. has the potential to be a minefield for employers. As I wrote in a post titled Overtime Pay and Mobile Technology, providing employees with smart phones carries with it the real risk of exposing employers to claims for unpaid overtime.
Yet there is another risk that employers face when they provide their employees with mobile technology and fail to implement policies on the uses to which to those employees may put that technology: The risk that employees will use that technology for non-work related purposes.
(c) istock/vchal
When the Court of Appeal for Ontario released its decision in the case of Jones v. Tsige, 2012 ONCA 32 many commented upon how Ontario law had finally recognized the tort of "invasion of personal privacy."
However, saying that the Court of Appeal recognized “the tort” is not entirely accurate. What the Court of Appeal recognized was that there are, in fact, four torts that fall under the umbrella of ‘invasion of privacy.’
Do employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in employer-provided technology?
Although it was a criminal case, the case of R. v. Cole, 2011 ONCA 218, presented an interesting question: Whether a high-school teacher had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of a work computer on which he was entitled to store personal information.
The decision is even more interesting because it was authored by Justice Karakatsanis, now of the Supreme Court of Canada.
