R v Araya, 2025 ABCA 61
[27] The appellant concedes that a police officer can be honestly mistaken about the identity of an arrestee without undermining the reasonableness of the grounds for arrest. However, the appellant argues that the TAC team’s plan to detain another, unidentified individual, while they arrested Mr. Lugela, made his subsequent arrest unlawful.
[28] The police admitted that they did not have any knowledge of the appellant’s involvement in a crime, did not know the appellant’s identity and did not know the appellant’s relationship to Mr. Lugela. In cross-examination, Constable Chan testified the police planned to “detain” both persons to control the situation and for officer safety.
[29] The appellant argues the lawfulness of an arrest, pursuant to section 9 of the Charter, includes the police plan for the arrest and whether it is Charter compliant. The appellant provides no case law as authority for such a proposition.
[30] In R v Reid, 2019 ONCA 32, the accused appellant argued he was illegally detained when the police spoke to him when they had no grounds to arrest. Among the facts he relied on was police testimony that if the appellant had tried to leave, the police would have stopped him from doing so. However, the appellant did not try to leave. The Ontario Court of Appeal stated, “What might have happened had events unfolded differently does not inform the legal character of what did happen” (para 44). The Court held that “Charter rights are not breached by intention, but action” and quoted R v Clayton, 2007 SCC 32 at para 48:
[Officer] intention alone does not attract a finding of unconstitutionality. It is not until that subjective intent is accompanied by actual conduct that it becomes relevant. We would otherwise have the Orwellian result that Charter breaches are determined on the basis of what police officers intend to do, or think they can do, not on what they actually do.
[31] We find that the police officers’ plan of arrest did not make the arrest unlawful.
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