according to court documents.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n\n There, they made an unusual discovery: 15,000 Canadian dollars\u2019 worth of bills in the floor heating ducts of the living room, about 32,000 dollars stored in locations around the garage, and over 1.2 million worth of Canadian bills in a rubber tub buried in the ground under the garage.\n <\/p>\n
\n All up, the stash was worth 1.19 million US dollars in 2009.\n <\/p>\n
\n Police also found a variety of drugs, including cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy, and told Canadian media at the time that they were \u201cflabbergasted.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Breton was charged with various offences, including possession of the proceeds of crime, and was initially convicted. But in a retrial, he successfully argued the search of his property wasn\u2019t lawful, and he was acquitted.\n <\/p>\n
\n But then came the matter of what to do with all of the money.\n <\/p>\n
\n On Monday, an Ontario appeals court upheld a 2023 ruling that decided the lion\u2019s share of the money should go to the government.\n <\/p>\n
\n The appeals court noted the trial judge, Justice Bruce Fitzpatrick, remarked that it was \u201cunusual for an average person to have such a large amount of money buried in tubs underneath their property.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The judge also noted that the most common type of bill found in the bundles was 20 Canadian dollars, which is the most common denomination associated with the drug trade.\n <\/p>\n
\n Moreover, Breton had not reported any income to the Canada Revenue Agency between 2001 and 2008, the documents said.\n <\/p>\n
\n Fitzpatrick also did not buy Breton\u2019s justifications for why he had so much cash \u2013 that he had won it in a lottery or casino, or had earned it from his vehicle repair business.\n <\/p>\n
\n The trial judge then ordered that most of the money be handed over to the government, a decision the appeals court affirmed.\n <\/p>\n
\n Sanaa Ahmed, assistant professor of law at the University of Calgary, said the case is an example of \u201clegalistic hair-splitting.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cConfronted with facts such as these, courts will often find ways to justify confiscating monies and thus \u2018punishing\u2019 the accused, even though they may have been acquitted otherwise,\u201d she told CNN in an email.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cUnfortunately, as societies, we\u2019re growing increasingly comfortable with breaking some rules to catch the so-called \u2018bad guys,\u2019\u201d Ahmed added. \u201cBut we forget that we made those rules precisely to avoid subjective, normative judgements by those who found themselves in judicial office.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Michelle Gallant, professor of law at the University of Manitoba, said in this case, the onus is on Breton to prove the money was obtained legally, noting \u201ccash is the currency of illegal drugs.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhat legitimate source might underlie dollars stuffed in a barrel and buried? Why bury it? Each day, at the very least, you would even bank interest,\u201d Gallant said.\n <\/p>\n
\n But it wasn\u2019t all bad news for Breton. The appeals court upheld Fitzpatrick\u2019s prior ruling that Breton gets to keep 15,000 Canadian dollars which was found inside the vents of the home, since the judge couldn\u2019t rule out that that cash had been obtained lawfully. In today\u2019s money, that\u2019s worth just over $10,600.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Canadian man has lost his 16-year legal battle to get back more than 1.2 million Canadian dollars…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":394220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[50,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-394219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115586724243755293","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}