Section 8 of the Charter guarantees the right of everyone to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure. That being so, its principal purpose lies in protecting persons from unreasonable state intrusion upon their privacy or, expressed positively, to protect the person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the state. This makes it necessary, when the section is invoked, to assess the person’s interest in being left alone by the government against the government’s interest in intruding upon the privacy of the person for the purpose of law enforcement: Hunter v. Southam, 1984 CanLII 33 (SCC), [1984] 2 S.C.R. 145.
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