The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday that Ontario’s public school boards are branches of government and “cannot be denied their constitutional obligations” under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, regardless of the terms of their collective bargaining agreements.
The court made the decision after hearing a case in which two Ontario public school teachers claimed their right to protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures” under section 8 of the Charter was violated by their school principal and board of directors.
“Lower courts have analyzed whether the Charter applies to school boards and come to different conclusions,” the court said. “The time has come to decide whether the Charter applies to Ontario’s public school boards.”
“Public education is an inherently governmental function,” the Supreme Court ruled Friday, noting that “the Charter has a unique constitutional character because it applies in cases involving government.”
While the decision is likely to influence future decisions in lower courts across the country, the Supreme Court said Friday’s decision “only pertains to Ontario public school boards” because the seven Supreme Court justices who heard the case did not look at the makeup of public school boards in other provinces.
The case stems from the actions of two teachers and a principal at a school served by the York Region District School Board during the 2014-2015 school year.
According to an earlier Ontario Court of Appeal decision that outlined more details about the case, Grade 2 teachers at Mountjoy Public School were concerned that one of their colleagues was receiving preferential treatment.
One of the teachers, identified in the ruling only as Mr. Shen, was instructed to report the information to the union and take notes. Mr. Shen started the recordings using his personal email account and then gave access to them to another teacher, identified only as Mr. Lai.
Although the logs were accessible online, the information they contained was not stored on work computers.
Teachers maintain discipline
The principal, who is referred to in the ruling as Mr. Pettigrew, heard about the logs from other teachers and reported his findings to the board’s superintendent, who instructed the principal to speak with human resources. The IT department then searched the board’s online files for evidence of the logs but found none on the school’s hard drive or Google Drive.
After the search turned up nothing, Pettigrew walked into the classroom after Shen had left and touched the mouse pad on his school-issued laptop, causing the screen to light up and a document titled “Log Google Docs” to appear on the screen, according to the ruling.
According to the ruling, Pettigrew read the documents and took photos of about 100 items on his cell phone. He then took the photos to a board supervisor, who instructed Pettigrew to confiscate his laptop. The laptop was subsequently searched, but nothing was found on either hard drive because the documents were only stored on the cloud.
Shen and Lai were subsequently served with disciplinary letters stating that the teachers had used board technology to access and keep logs during school hours, and the letters remained on their records for three years.
Shen and Lai filed a grievance through their union, alleging a violation of their privacy rights. The case went to arbitration, but the arbitrator sided with the school board.
The union appealed the decision in Ontario court, and the court sided with the arbitrator, arguing that the principal’s search did not violate the Charter because Shen and Lai had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace.
The Ontario Court of Appeal set aside the arbitrator’s decision, saying the Ontario court erred in deciding that public school boards were not subject to the Charter.
“Ontario public school teachers are protected under section 8 of the Charter from unreasonable searches and seizures at their places of employment,” the Supreme Court of Canada said in its decision.
“Regardless of the terms of a collective bargaining agreement, state agencies cannot negate their constitutional obligations,” the ruling said.
