Ottawa won't appeal court's secrecy law decision

Last Updated: Friday, November 3, 2006 | 7:03 PM ET

CBC News

Ottawa will not appeal an Ontario court decision that struck down sections of Canada's secrecy law and threw out RCMP warrants used to search a reporter's home in an attempt to find the source of information about the Maher Arar affair.

In a statement Friday, Justice Minister Vic Toews said he "decided that it is not in the public interest" to appeal Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushny's Oct. 19 decision, which quashed three sections of the so-called leakage provisions of the Security of Information Act.

The act was passed following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Toews said the government will instead consider "legislative options" to resolve concerns raised by the judge.

Mounties raided reporter's home, office

The RCMP launched a criminal probe in the weeks following publication of a Nov. 8, 2003, story by Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, which cited a "security source" and a leaked document offering details of what Arar allegedly told his Syrian captors.

The investigation led RCMP officers to raid O'Neill's home and office in January 2004, in which they confiscated her computer hard drives and notebooks in search of the leaked document.

The Mounties said they believed O'Neill published her article "based on the receipt of secret classified information."

O'Neill's legal team had argued the Security of Information Act provisions used to obtain the RCMP search warrants violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The sections of the law that were struck down dealt with communicating, receiving and failing to return official information and were drawn directly from the decades-old Official Secrets Act, long criticized as archaic and poorly drafted.