In anticipation of the upcoming appeal of R v. Kang Brown and R v. A.M to the Supreme Court of Canada, On the Identity Trail’s Ian Kerr and Jena McGill are about to publish “Emanations, Snoop Dogs and Reasonable Expectations of Privacy”, forthcoming in Criminal Law Quarterly 52 (23).  This article suggests that these cases, like the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in R. v. Tessling, will raise broad and important questions about the nature of privacy and autonomy in a world of ubiquitous information emanation.

In their article, Ian and Jena express concern about an increasingly problematic judicial approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy in odour emanations, arguing that a failure to clarify Tessling in the snoop dog cases and in the broader context of ubiquitous information emanation, especially alongside the maintenance of reductionist, non-normative approaches to informational privacy across Canadian courts, could seriously diminish the privacy rights of Canadians in a manner that the Supreme Court of Canada has until now been very careful to guard against.