R v Omar – 2019 SCC 32 (Brown):

Upholds the ONCA decision (excerpted below).

R v Omar – 2018 ONCA 975 (Brown):

[75] Grant offered general guidance at the conceptual level about when a psychological detention occurs. However, the jurisprudence reveals that the application of Grant’s conceptual principles to the reality of street-level interactions stills leaves us in the situation described by the trial judge — “the point at which an encounter becomes a detention is not always clear.”
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[97] I have reviewed these cases to illustrate that the conceptual certainty of Grant’s established legal standards, which underpins my colleague’s critique of the trial judge’s approach to the first Grant factor, in reality becomes fuzzy when applied to the specifics of a particular case. The conflicting results of this court in Atkins and Fountain, decided only two years apart, exemplify the lack of certainty and practical “on-the-street” guidance offered by the s. 9 jurisprudence in the context of community policing interactions.
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[130] Because the lethal problem posed by illegal handguns often seems remote from our daily judicial lives: we tend to live in safe residential areas; and we work in highly secure courthouses. The problem may directly touch others in the community; but for most of us it is a problem only read about in the media. As a result, we judges can be tempted to conceptualize issues under 24(2) in a somewhat abstract fashion, making decisions in an environment some distance removed from that where their real-life impact will be felt.
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[138] It is, of course, a matter of balance under s. 24(2). But the balance necessary to offer Canadians a peaceful community in which to live is not achieved by neutering the third Grant factor and treating illegal handguns as fungible with any other kind of evidence for the purposes of a s. 24(2) analysis.