The Supreme Court of Canada issued its decision in R v Singer, 2026 SCC 8, an appeal concerning the scope of privacy limitations on the “implied licence to knock”. As CCLA outlined in its intervention in this appeal, expanding the scope of this exception would erode a central privacy principle—that police cannot intrude on the privacy of our homes without justification.
The “implied license to knock” is a common law principle that allows any member of the public to enter someone’s private property to approach their front door and knock on it. The general principle underpinning this rule is that residents can be presumed to invite the public onto their property for the limited purpose of knocking on their front door to communicate with them.
While normally police would need judicial authorization to enter someone’s residence, as members of the public, police can rely on the implied license to enter someone’s residence—but solely for the purpose of knocking on the front door to communicate with the home’s occupant. Police can, for example, approach someone’s door to ask them to turn their music down or to inform them that their family member has been injured. The doctrine has always included limits, however, and CCLA argued that police could not rely on it to enter someone’s property for the purpose of gathering incriminating evidence against the occupant.
Police’s purpose for entering the property is critical to assessing the scope of the implied license and, by extension, the scope of privacy protection the chartes will extend to residents. If the implied license to knock extended to general evidence-gathering, police would effectivement have the ability to invade people’s residence at their whim. Open-ended discretion of this nature is subject to abuse, and the resulting harms fall most frequently on members of marginalized communities. Importantly, there is no principled basis for presuming that someone would invite police onto their property to conduct a criminal investigation of them.
Dans R v Singer, the court (by a 5-4 majority) expanded the implied license to knock, permitting police to enter a residence with the intention of conducting a criminal investigation by speaking to the occupant.
The judgement retains some safeguards in the implied license to knock, while leaving many questions open for future courts to decide.
Police are still prohibited from extending their search to inside the home or to a car sitting on the driveway, and must also still limit their investigation to interrogations of the resident. That is, police cannot enter a residence with the intent of looking through someone’s window or deploying a sniffer dog. But police can nonetheless rely on evidence they happen to see, hear or smell in the course of their interrogation of the occupant or on the way to their doorstep.
Police also remain prohibited from relying on the implied license to knock doctrine to conduct a “speculative” criminal investigation, but the court provides no guidance on what basis an investigation might be considered speculative.
It also remains an open question what principles will guide the future application of the implied license to knock if it becomes further unmoored from the underlying presumption that doctrine reflects norms generally accepted by residents. As Justices O’Bonsawin and Moreau reiterate in their dissenting opinion, “no occupant would wish others to enter their property for the purpose of gathering evidence against them.”
Vous pouvez lire le factum (arguments juridiques) de la CCLA ici.
La CCLA remercie Nader R. Hasan et Alexandra Heine de Stockwoods LLP pour leur excellent travail. pro bono représentation dans ce cas.
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