Mandel: Airbnb host to be tried for voyeurism

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An accused Airbnb voyeur will finally be tried.

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Michael Chow was charged with voyeurism in 2018 after a shocked Vancouver man discovered a hidden camera in the luxury condo he rented to her for 10 days during the Toronto International Film Festival.

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Chow, however, walked free after the trial judge and an appeals judge agreed that Toronto police violated his privacy when they entered the condo at the tenant’s invitation and seized the hidden camera without a warrant.

They threw away the evidence and without the camera clock, there was no case.

But in a decision released Tuesday, Ontario’s highest court found those judges wrong. They overturned Chow’s acquittal and ordered a new trial after deciding he had no reasonable expectation of privacy after renting the place to a stranger.

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“He had no expectation of privacy,” Judge Grant Huscroft wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.

“A reasonable person at (Chow’s) would expect the complainant to have the right to call the police if he believed a crime had been committed against him in the apartment and would expect the complainant invites the police to the apartment to investigate. This was, after all, the applicant’s home at the relevant time.

Rob Wallenberg booked the Victoria St. luxury condo on Airbnb and checked out on September 6, 2018, never imagining it was being watched.

When a light from a bedside clock was interfering with her sleep on Sept. 7, Wallenberg moved her camera bag to the front.

On the morning of September 9, he noticed his bag had been taken away from the clock and there was a message from Chow that he had been in the apartment and left him coupons. According to the ruling, the suspicious tenant then examined the alarm clock and discovered that it contained a hidden camera.

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“I was super angry and then super scared,” Wallenberg told CTV Vancouver at the time.

He called Airbnb who advised him to go to a hotel and call the police. According to their policy, hosts are required to disclose all security cameras and recording devices to their guests, but “cameras are never allowed in bedrooms or bathrooms.”

Wallenberg let the police into the condo and they seized the clock camera. When they realized it contained a memory card, they obtained a warrant to search it – no video of Wallenberg was found but there were files which showed various people in the room, including an unnamed man. identified masturbating on the bed.

Chow was accused of voyeurism.

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He claimed that his rights had been violated by an unlawful search and seizure and that the evidence should be excluded. The lower courts agreed. “The police should now know that they cannot, without proper authorization, remove a citizen’s property from his dwelling, even if it is occasional lodging,” the trial judge wrote.

The Crown appealed and lost.

The appeals judge found that the police search of the apartment, seizure of the clock camera and checking the device for a memory card were serious Charter breaches, stating that it There was “absolutely no reason” why police hadn’t obtained a search warrant from the start.

Not so, according to Ontario’s highest court.

“It was not objectively reasonable for (Chow) to expect that the complainant could not invite the police into the apartment to investigate a crime that may have been committed against him in the apartment. This is not a privacy claim that should be constitutionally protected.

It was Wallenberg who would have seen his rights violated – and not the other way around.

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