It’s the summer and fall of 2021, and the Ottawa police drug squad is looking into a man suspected of being involved with illegal drugs and gangs.
The officers think they see the target in a truck during their surveillance. Later they realize it’s actually the target’s brother with two other men, but they continue to watch the truck.
Nothing happens that could be described as a drug deal, but police are suspicious. They have a hunch.
The truck is then driven toward Toronto, eventually stopping in a movie theatre parking lot in Scarborough.
It’s evening. A car arrives in the lot. One of the people in the truck gets out, hops into the car for a minute, then gets back into the truck — a move police believe is a drug deal or resupply.
Half a kilo of fentanyl seized
The target’s brother, who had stayed near the truck, drives off, and later drives the two others back to Ottawa, arriving in the early morning.
Det.-Const. Aristidis Tasoulis and Det.-Const. Tim Renwick give the drug team the reasonable and probable grounds to arrest the trio for possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking, and the arrests are made.
When police pop the truck and search its occupants, they find half a kilogram of fentanyl, 19 oxycodone pills, a single anticonvulsant pill and $2,600 in cash.
Sounds like a happy ending for Ottawa police, right?
Nope.
No grounds, evidence excluded, case collapses
Turns out, the brother was never identified to the squad as a target. The truck was never identified as a vehicle of interest. Neither Tasoulis nor veteran senior officer Renwick wrote anything about the brother in their notebooks. And there were, in fact, no reasonable or probable grounds to arrest the brother.
To top it off, Tasoulis later lied in court to bolster the drug squad’s case for having grounds after the fact, when he and Renwick knew they didn’t have the grounds.
All this, according to a scathing written decision from Superior Court Justice Anne London-Weinstein last week.
The actions of the officers were so serious they breached the brother’s Charter rights. The force and the Crown couldn’t use the evidence police obtained, so the Crown closed its case and London-Weinstein acquitted the brother.
In his defence, Tasoulis testified that his failure to write notes about the brother and to distribute his photo to the squad were mistakes he’ll never repeat, and that he was trying to keep his surveillance briefing forms consistent, the judge notes.
‘Antithesis of what a reasonable person might expect’
London-Weinstein called the officer’s explanation “illogical” and “incomprehensible,” and wrote that Tasoulis wasn’t honest in court.
“This attempt to mislead the court by those charged with upholding the Charter rights of those who they investigate, detain and arrest is the antithesis of what a reasonable person might expect to occur in a trial of charges as serious as this one,” she wrote.
Nonetheless, it was a tough call. The case was “very serious,” fentanyl and oxycontin are deadly and have “wreaked havoc” in the community, and excluding important evidence like this might be hard for the public to swallow given that the hunch police had led to a significant drug seizure, London-Weinstein wrote.
People might even think the officers were correct to act as they did.
But, she added, “it is hard to imagine conduct which more effectively undermines the reputation of the administration of justice.”
Ottawa police did not respond to a request for comment Friday, and the union representing rank-and-file officers declined to comment.
Defence lawyer Joe Addelman, who successfully represented the target’s brother, also declined to comment.
Tasoulis and Renwick remain assigned to the drug unit.