As some might know who've been reading my original blog publiclawadvocacy, or any my books The Investigator's Legal Handbook (Carswell, 2006), Le manuel jurdique de l'enquêteur (Editions Yvon Blais, 2010), or The Investigator's Legal Handbook, 2d ed (Carswell, 2014), I served for many years as a Federal Crown drug prosecutor. First in Toronto and surrounding GTA, and then in Halifax covering the four Atlantic provinces.
During that time, and since, I've put on courses for law enforcement agencies on how to draft search warrants & wiretaps, how and when to arrest, take statements, draft charges, and the legal use of other techniques like production orders and proceeds of crime management orders. I've also prosecuted countless cases of simple possession, possession for the purpose of trafficking, trafficking, cultivation, production, conspiracy, importation and proceeds of crime.
In the course of all that, I learned a few dos and don'ts of drug cases.
The reality is that while the overall crime rate - and levels of criminal prosecutions - has been consistently falling throughout Canada over the past decades, the number of drugs prosecutions has been rising. See the good piece by Mila Dauvergne, Trends in Police-Reported Drug Offences in Canada. Though the stats are now a bit dated, this remains the best piece I know of explaining how crime peaked about 1990 and then declined such that around 1998 the drug offence rate per 100,000 people outnumbered the other criminal offence rate.
By 2007 the drug offence rate per 100,000 population was 50% high than the other criminal offences rate. In 2013, drug offences remained stuck at 310 per 100,000 population, approximately the same as 2007 levels (Police-Reported Crime Statistics in Canada, 2013).
Thus I thought it was time Canada had a blog devoted to drug defence practice. I may from time to time also talk about other federally prosecuted offences looked after by what's now called the Public Prosecution Service of Canada - those would include offences related to federal statutes other than the Criminal Code, and I might occasionally deal with some complementary Criminal Code offences like Fraud (which are sometimes prosecutions in tandem with tax evasion) or proceeds of crime (which are part of the Code, but are already federally prosecuted).
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