Montreal police are ignoring a Supreme Court ruling when it comes to seeking search warrants against journalists.

This was revealed as a Quebec court lifted the seal on the search warrants in the Patrick Lagacé affair.

Those documents reveal the Montreal police department has never established a procedure for officers when investigations involve journalists, something that media lawyer Mark Bantey found surprising.

"Twenty-five years ago the Supreme Court of Canada said special precautions must be taken when search warrants are executed against journalists and here in the search warrant the police admit they have no policy in place," said Bantey.

This affair started last year when police suspected a sergeant-detective of planting drugs on suspects and falsifying reports from informants, as well as frequenting massage parlours.

That officer was arrested in July 2016 and charged with obstruction of justice and breach of trust.

As part of their investigation, police sought and obtained warrants to examine the phone records of La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé, who had been in contact with the officer.

That led to the revelation that police in Montreal were tracking several journalists, all apparently as a way to track officers who were leaking internal information.

Lawyers for CTV and other media petitioned the court and succeeded in having the warrant unsealed, and they show that Montreal has no policy in place for search warrants involving journalists.

"The other thing that I find surprising is that there is absolutely no link between the search warrant obtained against Patrick Lagacé and the criminal offences they suspect the officers committed," said Bantey.

The Quebec Federation of Journalists said the whole affair underlines the need for better protection for journalists’ sources.

“If police are spying on journalists to find journalist sources, the sources won't speak anymore,” said Jean-Thomas Leveille, vice-preident of the Quebec Federation of Journalists. “We want people with important information to be free to speak to journalists.”

Montreal police refused to speak with the media on the matter Wednesday, but Police Chief Philippe Pichet has said in the past his department did nothing wrong.

La Presse is asking a judge to quash the search warrant.