The Alberta Court of Appeal has released its decision with respect to disclosure of approved instrument maintenance records:
The Crown’s first party disclosure obligations under Stinchcombe extend only to “fruits of the investigation”. The documents in the standard disclosure package could be described as the time-of-test documents, and are clearly “fruits of the investigation”. The balance of the maintenance records requested by the respondents are not, however, “fruits of the investigation”, and they are subject to third party O'Connor disclosure. As a matter of evidence in these appeals, and as a matter of logic generally, historical maintenance records will rarely if ever be actually relevant to making full answer and defence in a particular prosecution, and therefore the accused will rarely be able to show “likely relevance” of those records. As to the evidence in these particular appeals, the uncontradicted expert evidence is that historical maintenance records are irrelevant to proving the accuracy or inaccuracy of any particular test. The “maintenance” records that are relevant to that issue are whether the instrument performed the particular test as designed, or registered a “fail”. R. v. Vallentgoed, 2016 ABCA 358
For earlier decisions, see R. v. Vallentgoed, 2015 ABCA 202 and R. v. Vallentgoed, 2015 ABQB 206. There was a dissenting judgment in the Court of Appeal, so we may see this case at the Supreme Court of Canada next.