(Legally Made) Secret Recording: Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen retired in 2010, not 2008. The lie that put an innocent man in jail.

Former Toronto police sergeant Donald Best alleges in his recently filed civil lawsuit that the OPP Professional Standards Unit concealed their fellow officer’s crimes and in February of 2013 falsely told Best that Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen had resigned from the OPP in 2008.

In fact, Detective Sergeant Van Allen did not resign from the Ontario Provincial Police until October of 2010, a full year after he had illegally worked as an unlicensed private investigator against the plaintiff, Donald Best.

According to Best’s lawsuit, the above (legally made*) secret recording of a December 30, 2013 telephone call with retired OPP Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen confirms that Van Allen was a serving police officer in charge of the Ontario Provincial Police elite Criminal Profiling Unit when in October 2009 he illegally investigated Donald Best ‘on the side’ to benefit one side of a civil lawsuit in Ontario, Canada.

Van Allen swore a deceptive and false affidavit in October 2009 that was used to convict and sentence the Plaintiff Donald Best to 3 months in jail. Conspicuously absent in the affidavit is the fact that Van Allen was, at the time, a serving OPP Detective Sergeant, who was being paid ‘on the side’ to illegally work as an unlicensed private investigator for a major Toronto law firm.

The Plaintiff, Donald Best, alleges that Mr. Van Allen’s fellow police officers in the OPP’s Professional Standards Unit covered up Van Allen’s crimes even though it meant an innocent man would go to jail.

Mr. Best’s Statement of Claim states:    

“(Senior police officers in the Professional Standards Units) knew that the Plaintiff (Best) was facing 3 months in jail, and was in hearings before Justice Shaughnessy in January through May, 2013. They knew that Van Allen’s affidavit was illegal and deceptive, and that the court had used the Van Allen evidence to convict the Plaintiff. They knew that neither the court nor the Plaintiff was aware that Van Allen had been a serving police officer at the time he investigated the Plaintiff and swore the affidavit. They knew that the court had been deceived.”

“They knew or should have known that the truth about Van Allen was vital evidence to the Court in considering a just outcome in the Plaintiff’s contempt of court hearing. They knew, or should have known that had the Court been aware of the truth about Van Allen, his deceptive affidavit and improper secret police investigation of the Plaintiff, that the Court might not have convicted the Plaintiff in 2010, and might set him free in 2013. The police deliberately withheld this important evidence from both the Plaintiff and the Court.”

Donald Best served over two months hard time in solitary confinement in Lindsay’s Central East Correctional Centre before being released by an Ontario Superior Court judge in April of 2014 after a special application to the court.

None of the allegations has yet been proven in a court of law, and to our knowledge at the time of publication none of the defendants has filed a Statement of Defence. Visitors to this website are encouraged to examine the legal documents and other evidence posted here and to make up their own minds about the civil lawsuit known as ‘Donald Best v. Gerald Ranking et al’. (Superior Court of Justice, Central East Region: Barrie, Court File No. 14-0815)

Additional information can be found at the SolidCase.CA post: Civil lawsuit alleges Canadian police expertise, information and resources illegally sold to major law firms.

* Legally Made Secret Voice Recordings

In Canada it is legal for anyone to record a conversation as long as at least one party provides consent. In other words, if only one person in a room or during a group telephone conversation provides consent for the conversation to be recorded, then the recording is legally made.

Different rules apply to the police and agents of the police.

All of the voice recordings presented at DonaldBest.CA were legally made according to Canadian law.