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The court dismissed a mid-trial application for third-party records in a private prosecution, finding Charter protections inapplicable to private actors and the relevance claims speculative.
Defendants in a private prosecution for regulatory offences arising from bird collisions with their buildings brought a mid-trial application for production of internal records from FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program), a non-profit environmental advocacy organization that had monitored bird strikes at the defendants' property for over a decade.
The defendants sought FLAP's records regarding its cooperation with Ecojustice, the environmental advocacy group prosecuting the case, arguing the documents were relevant to claims of unreasonable search and seizure, abuse of process, and witness credibility and reliability.
The court dismissed the application, finding that the defendants could not advance Charter claims against private actors, that their abuse of process claim lacked an air of reality, and that their credibility and reliability arguments were speculative and unsupported by evidence.
