People call us about family matters at the worst point of their lives. They are frightened, they are exhausted, and they have usually been told by somebody — a friend, a forum, a television plot — that an investigator can settle the question that is keeping them awake.

We would rather lose the work than let that go uncorrected. A large share of the family enquiries we receive describe an outcome that would not change anything, sought through methods that are criminal offences to perform. This article is our attempt to say all of that once, in plain language, so you can read it privately before you spend money on a phone call.

If any of it reads as blunt, it is not indifference. It is the version we would want if we were the one making the call.

Start here: if anyone is in danger, this is not an investigation

If there is a threat to you or to a child right now, that is a matter for emergency services, and then for your lawyer and the family law process. It is not a surveillance engagement.

We want to be exact about why. Surveillance is slow, it is retrospective, and it produces a report days or weeks later. It does not intervene. It cannot protect anyone. A person who is in danger and who spends their money and their time on an investigator instead of on the protective steps available to them has bought a document and delayed the thing that could have helped. There is no version of our service that is an appropriate substitute for an emergency call or for the orders a court can make quickly when it is asked properly.

That is the single most important paragraph on this page.

What a court in a family matter is actually interested in

The gap that causes most of the disappointment is this one.

A court dealing with parenting questions is overwhelmingly concerned with the children — their circumstances, their safety, the care they are actually receiving, and what arrangement serves them going forward. It is a forward-looking inquiry about a child's situation, not a backward-looking inquiry into which adult behaved worse.

What clients most often want to prove is a partner's conduct. Who left, who lied, who is seeing someone new, who said what. That material is enormously important to the person living it. It is frequently not important to the outcome they are seeking, and evidence of it can land in front of a decision-maker as noise, or worse, as a signal about the person who went looking for it.

We are not in a position to tell you where that line falls in your matter — that is your lawyer's work, and it is genuinely fact-specific. What we can tell you is that the question "will this change the result?" has to be answered by counsel before anyone is engaged to gather it. An investigator who takes a retainer without that answer having been given is selling you hours, not help.

The second thing courts care about is verifiability. A dated, documented, first-hand record of something observable is worth more than a large quantity of inference. Which is another way of saying that the narrow, boring questions are the ones investigative work can sometimes actually answer.

What cannot lawfully be obtained, by us or by anyone

This is where the misconceptions are most dangerous, because acting on them exposes the client personally.

A spouse's communications. Criminal Code s.184 makes it an offence to knowingly intercept a private communication by means of an electro-magnetic, acoustic, mechanical or other device. The exception people have heard of is at s.184(2): interception is permitted where the originator of the communication or its intended recipient has consented. You can record a conversation you are a part of. Being married to two people talking does not make you a party to their conversation, and it does not make their communications yours.

A spouse's accounts, phone or computer. Criminal Code s.342.1 covers unauthorized use of a computer — fraudulently and without colour of right obtaining a computer service, intercepting a computer system's functions, or using, possessing or trafficking in a password that would enable it. A shared address, a joint bank account, paying the phone bill, and knowing the passcode because you have always known it are none of them authorization. This is the point at which we have to be direct: if you have already been into the other person's email or phone, stop, and tell your lawyer before you tell anyone else. It is a problem that gets worse when the material is used.

Anything obtained by pretending to be someone. Criminal Code s.403 covers identity fraud — fraudulently impersonating another person with intent to gain an advantage or to cause disadvantage to the person impersonated. Calling a bank, a school, a landlord or a clinic while presenting as your spouse is not a grey area.

We will not describe how any of these things would be done, and you should treat any firm that will as the risk it is. Naming the limit is the whole service here.

Note the shape of the exposure, too. It is not only the person who does it. Material obtained this way tends to surface in the proceeding it was gathered for, and at that point the question stops being what it proved and becomes how it was obtained.

Tracking a person or a vehicle

Clients ask about this constantly, and the honest answer is that it carries real legal exposure and our answer is normally no.

Criminal Code s.492.1 is the tracking-warrant provision: it sets out how a justice or judge may authorize tracking data to be obtained by means of a tracking device in an offence investigation. The existence of that judicial machinery tells you Parliament regards location tracking as an intrusion serious enough to require authorization — and the authority it confers runs to public officials, not to private parties.

The exposure that actually reaches a family matter is civil. Under BC's Privacy Act, s.1(1) makes it "a tort, actionable without proof of damage, for a person, wilfully and without a claim of right, to violate the privacy of another." Section 1(4) addresses the technique by name: "privacy may be violated by eavesdropping or surveillance, whether or not accomplished by trespass." Section 1(2) sets the measure as the privacy that is "reasonable in the circumstances, giving due regard to the lawful interests of others", and s.2 sets out the exceptions, consent among them.

Read together, in a domestic context: continuous covert monitoring of a person you are separating from, on a vehicle you do not own and control, is close to the paradigm case the statute describes. It needs no trespass to be actionable, and your former partner would not need to prove a loss. It also hands the other side a story about you, in a proceeding where your judgment is part of what is being assessed.

The general limits we operate under are set out in more detail in what a BC private investigator can and cannot legally do, and what lawful observation can and cannot produce is covered in surveillance evidence in BC.

The advice that costs us the work

In a great many family matters, the money is better spent on the lawyer.

This is not modesty. It is arithmetic. Investigative hours are consumed at a rate that does not depend on whether anything is found, and a family file is often the worst possible fit for that model: the subject's routine is unpredictable, the observation windows are long, and the question the client wants answered is frequently one that observation cannot resolve.

Meanwhile, the family law process has its own machinery for getting at facts — disclosure obligations, sworn statements, and consequences for people who do not comply. Those tools are usually cheaper, they reach material no investigator could lawfully touch, and they arrive in a form the court already accepts.

So the sequence we recommend, and the one we will ask you about if you call, is:

  1. Speak to a family lawyer first. If you do not have one, that is the first expenditure, not the second.
  2. Ask counsel what would actually move your matter, and whether the thing you want proved is among it.
  3. Only if counsel identifies a specific, verifiable, factual gap that lawful investigative work could close — and says so — is there a file for us.

Roughly speaking, more of these conversations end at step one or two than at step three. That is the correct distribution, and we would rather it stayed that way than have you pay us to find out.

We have written separately about what actually drives investigation costs in BC, because the second most common way people lose money on a family file is an unbounded question billed by the hour.

The narrow set of family-adjacent work that is real

Where counsel does identify a gap, it is usually specific and unglamorous:

  • Confirming an address or a residence, from lawful sources and public records, where it genuinely matters and is genuinely in dispute.
  • Locating a person so documents can be served on them, which is ordinary process work.
  • Documenting an observable, dated fact from a public vantage point, without trespass and without intrusion into places where privacy is reasonably expected, where counsel has identified why that fact matters.
  • Assembling material a person has published themselves, in a form with dates and provenance attached.

Each of these has the same character: a narrow factual question, a defined finish line, and a record whose origin can be explained. None of them involves the other person's private communications, accounts, devices or movements.

What to ask before you spend anything

  • Has my lawyer told me, specifically, that this fact would matter?
  • Can the question be written in one sentence with a condition under which the file is finished?
  • Does answering it require anything the other person has not consented to and a court has not authorized? If yes, the answer is no.
  • What will I do with this if it is found — and what will I do if it is not?

If the last question has no answer, the file is not ready, and no investigator can make it ready for you.

A closing note

We know how it feels to be told that the thing you are certain of cannot be pursued the way you imagined. We are not saying your concern is unfounded. We are saying that the route to addressing it runs through your lawyer and, where safety is involved, through emergency services — and that an investigator who tells you otherwise at this moment is taking advantage of a bad week.

If after all of that there is a narrow factual question and counsel who says it matters, we will talk to you about it plainly, including telling you when the answer is that we cannot lawfully help.

Sources

  • Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c. C-46, s.184 (interception of private communications) — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-184.html
  • Criminal Code, s.184(2) (exceptions, including consent of a party) — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-184.html
  • Criminal Code, s.342.1 (unauthorized use of a computer) — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-342.1.html
  • Criminal Code, s.403 (identity fraud) — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-403.html
  • Criminal Code, s.492.1 (tracking warrant) — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-492.1.html
  • Privacy Act, RSBC 1996, c. 373, s.1(1), s.1(2), s.1(4) (violation of privacy; reasonable in the circumstances; eavesdropping or surveillance), s.2 (exceptions) — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96373_01