54. (1) A staff member may conduct a routine non-intrusive search or a routine frisk search of a visitor, without individualized suspicion, where the visitor is entering or leaving the penitentiary.

    (2) If a visitor refuses to undergo a search referred to in subsection (1), the institutional head or a staff member designated by the institutional head may

prohibit a contact visit with an inmate and authorize a non-contact visit; or

require the visitor to leave the penitentiary forthwith.

R v. Bobier - (1998), 40 W.C.B. (2d) 6, [1998] S.J. No.654 (Sask.Prov.Ct.)

- There had been a suspicion by a correctional officer that the inmate the accused was visiting was dealing drugs within the institution and, as a result, the inmate's telecommunications were then intercepted by correctional authorities pursuant to an authorization issued by the institutional director. Based upon information gained from the intercepted telephone communications, police and corrections authorities had then been waiting for the accused at the time of his next visit. The court held that while the information derived from the intercepted telecommunications might have been authorized for the inmate, if used for very specific purposes under the Act, it was not authorized according to the process required when a private citizen was being investigated by authorities. Thus, it could not be said that any information gathered about the accused through the interception of telecommunications of the inmate was collected lawfully. Section 54 of the CCR Regulations provided for searches of visitors when "entering or leaving" a penitentiary but the accused had not been entering or leaving the institution when his telephone conversations were recorded. While the Crown also argued that the posting of warnings in the institution to inmates and visitors that their communications would be monitored meant that the accused should have known his calls could be recorded and gave an implied consent to that interception, the involuntary surrender of privacy rights in a visitor centre of an institution did not represent a consent in the free sense used in the Criminal Code. Moreover, the conversations had been intercepted while the accused was in his private residence, and it strained credibility to suggest that private citizens were forewarned that any conversation they had with an inmate would be monitored by law enforcement officials from any branch of the state.

Corresponding Act: Sections 46-67 Search and Seizure