THE LAGACÉ WARRANTS

The lid has come off the search warrants that allowed police to snoop on La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé’s cellphone records. It is now clear Montreal police were investigating something more serious than embarrassing internal leaks, although that was an aspect of their probe.

Police had reason to suspect one of their own, Sgt-Det. Fayçal Djelidi, was planting heroin on suspects, falsifying reports from informants, violating policies on handling confidential information and frequenting massage parlours. Djelidi was arrested in July 2016 and charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, breach of trust and soliciting sexual services.

But hundreds of pages of documentation provide little if any justification for this intrusion into Lagacé’s phone records, overriding his journalistic privilege and exposing his sources to police scrutiny.

Lagacé was never a suspect. He was in frequent contact with Djelidi — 85 times by one count. But police didn’t need Lagacé’s phone records to build their case against Djelidi, since they were already monitoring the officer’s phone, spying on his email account, tracking his use of police databases, putting him under physical surveillance and, later, wiretapping his phones.

Yet there was barely any discussion of Lagacé’s status as a journalist as police went 24 times to judges and justices of the peace seeking to monitor his communications. The first time the issue was addressed in the warrants came six months after the probe of Djelidi started. And then it was only to acknowledge that the force “has no procedure whatsoever setting out guidelines for investigations involving journalists.”

The warrants confirm fears that protections for journalists, their sources and the role of the media in a free and democratic society are weaker than previously believed — or, at the very least, they seem to be an afterthought.

Also worrisome is that Anie Samson, chair of the city’s public security committee, said she was reassured by the explanations offered by Montreal police brass behind closed doors — despite the force’s lack of a policy governing investigations involving journalists. Opposition councillor Alex Norris, himself a former Gazette reporter, called it a whitewash.

The Supreme Court of Canada has stopped short of offering blanket protection for reporters to shield their sources, but it does recognizes a privilege for journalists to be applied on a case-by-case basis. A 2010 decision set out the test: only when the information can’t be obtained any other way and only when there is a vital public interest at stake.

It’s hard to see how the Lagacé warrants passed this test and why no one seems to have thought to apply it.