Case Report – Rise of citizen journalism does not devalue work of professional journalists…

…but law enforcement trumps all.

Yesterday, the Ontario Court of Appeal restored a search warrant and assistance order that was served on the National Post. Unless the order is stayed pending an appeal, it will require the Post’s editor-in-chief to provide the RCMP with document and envelope received from a confidential informant. The RCMP believes the document and envelope will contain evidence that could identify a person who committed a criminal conspiracy against former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

In 2001, Andrew McIntosh from the Post received a document that appeared to be a Business Development Bank of Canada loan authorization for a $600,000 loan to the Auberge Grand-Mere. The document listed a $23,000 debt to “JAC Consultants,” a Chretien holding company. The auberge was in Mr. Chretien’s home riding, and he had previously admitted to contacting the BDB’s president to urge him to approve the loan.

McIntosh circulated copies of the document to the BDBC, to the Prime Minister’s Office and to Mr. Chretien personally the course of his investigation. Based on a comparison between its file copy of the document and what McIntosh provided, the BDBC complained to the RCMP that the document was a forgery. As part of its investigation, the RCMP sought the document and envelope. Although the allegedly forged communication had been widely distributed, it believed that document and envelope might contain fingerprints and DNA that would help it identity the sender. The RCMP obtained a search warrant and an assistance order that became the matter of the appeal. The Post resisted because McIntosh had promised anonymity to his informant (who simply passed the documents to him) and (so it appears) because he questioned the whether the disclosure would actually help the RCMP’s pursuit of the wrongdoer.

The Court of Appeal award turned on an analysis of the fourth “Wigmore criterion” – the final criterion for recognition of a case-by-case privilege, which asks whether the injury to the relationship between the parties to the communication that would flow from the disclosure is greater than the benefit gained from the correct disposal of the litigation. The Court held that it was appropriate to simply assess the Post’s Charter claim based on the Wigmore analysis because it required the same balancing of interests required by section 2(b) of the Charter.

The Court held that the judge who reviewed the search warrant erred in finding that balance weighed in favour of finding that the envelope and document were privileged because she wrongly inferred that there was only a speculative possibility that the documents would advance the investigation and wrongly disregarded the law enforcement interest at stake. In its reasoning, the Court held that an investigative journalist cannot insulate a potential wrongdoer from a law enforcement investigation by giving an absolute promise of confidentiality because this would lead to law enforcement’s role (and the court’s oversight of its role) being usurped:

McIntosh himself recognized that there must be at least some limits on the press’ entitlement to protect the confidentiality of its sources. That is why he told X that his promise of confidentiality would remain binding only so long as he believed that he was not being misled. However, once the court concluded that there were reasonable and probable grounds to believe the document was a forgery, McIntosh could not arrogate to himself the right to decide whether X was a wrongdoer.

Notably, the court rejected an argument that must have gotten the Post and the other participating media organizations backs’ up. The Crown had argued that citizen journalism was reason not to treat the journalist-source relationship as one which should be “sedulously fostered” under the third Wigmore criterion. The Court said:

We reject the Crown’s first contention. The case-by-case approach to privilege does not require us to establish the boundaries of legitimate journalism. The National Post is a recognized national news organization and McIntosh is a respected journalist. It can hardly be disputed that they fall within the class of persons who may be entitled to the benefit of journalist-confidential source privilege.

This comment is likely more interesting than significant, but the court’s Wigmore analysis goes more to the fundamental role of investigative journalists under the Charter. Members of the Fourth Estate are fierce defenders of this role, so we’ll see if they try for an appeal.

R. v. National Post, 2008 ONCA 139.