This section of the Charter has been raised on a couple of occasions in relation to institutional searches. Once again, the decisions were rendered prior to the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Hunter v Southam Inc (supra) and consequently, these decisions should be considered in light of that decision. A further decision of the Court in Dedman v R should also be born in mind. The Dedman case involved a charge of failing to comply with a roadside demand for a breathalyzer. The charge arose prior to the Charter although the decision was rendered on July 31st, 1985.

    The court upheld the police officer's powers to randomly stop people in motor vehicles as being within the powers of the police at common law as set forth in R v Waterfield and within the general scope of police duties to prevent crime and to protect life and property. The court held that this power on the part of the police was both necessary to the execution of that police duty, and reasonable, having regard to the nature of the liberty interfered with, and the importance of the public purpose served by the interference. It seems likely that the courts will be attracted by the reasoning in Dedman in most but not all institutional search situations, bearing in mind that the test under s8 of the Charter is one of "reasonableness".

    In Re Maltby (supra) it was held that strip searches following contact visits in a provincial remand detention centre, which were conducted to prevent and control the influx of drugs and weapons and other contraband that might pose a threat to the security of the institution, were minimum reasonable requirements and did not violate the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Similarly, in Re Soenen and Thomas et al it was held that the search by prison officials for weapons and other contraband that required a prisoner to be stripped naked and bend over so that a visual examination of his rectal area could be carried out did not constitute an unreasonable search. The court expressed the view that a visual search of the rectum of a person just arrested in the absence of reasonable probable cause to believe that an object had been concealed anally might be unreasonable and in violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy, but a search in the case of pretrial detainees in a detention facility, so long as the search was conducted in good faith and not for the purposes of punishment, would not be unreasonable, nor would it violate any reasonable expectation of privacy. In the court's view, such searches could be conducted in the absence of reasonable and probable grounds to believe that the prisoner being searched had concealed an object in his body cavity.