Going through someone else’s trash sometimes pays off.

Police and private investigators do it.

The sleuthing technique also worked in a case involving a Burnaby condo tower.

The 37-storey highrise in Metrotown was encountering problems with rubbish being littered on common property.

As a Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) related, the strata caretaker found a bag of garbage on the landscaping of the property.

The caretaker identified only as BS decided to open the bag to “identify who had littered”.

One item found was a shredded bank document from TD Canada Trust.

BS pieced the shredded paper together, and came up with a name.

“A photograph of the TD document shows ‘Mr. Gandong Xu’ as the recipient, with his address that matches the address he used in this dispute,” tribunal member Micah Carmody wrote in his reasons for decision.

Moreover, the bag was found in the “common property greenspace under the balconies of the units ending in ‘01’, which included Mr. Xu’s unit 901”.

After a hearing that Xu requested, the strata determined that Xu tossed the bag of household trash off his balcony.

It slapped the resident a fine of $200.

Xu filed a claim before the CRT, saying the strata has no evidence that the garbage was his.

Moreover, the man asserted that he did not get a fair hearing.

Xu wanted his $200 back.

Carmody dismissed Xu’s claim.

In his reasons for decision, the tribunal member noted that caretaker BS provided a written statement providing context about the garbage.

“Given that the garbage bag was found in a landscaped common property area where BS says there was a history of littered garbage, I find opening the garbage was a reasonable investigative step for BS to take,” Carmody wrote.

Hence, the tribunal member accepted BS’s evidence that the garbage belonged to Xu by virtue of the shredded TD document that the caretaker pieced together.

Carmody dismissed Xu’s argument that BS framed him with the TD document.

“He says BS had access to the ‘mailroom’ and could steal his mail any time,” Carmody related.

However, Xu has “not provided any explanation as to why BS would do this, such as personal animosity between them”.

Xu also argued that the TD document cannot be used as evidence based on the Privacy Act.

But Carmody noted that the Privacy Act does “not address the admissibility of evidence”.

The tribunal member recalled that in a different case, the Supreme Court of Canada held in its 2009 ruling in R. v. Patrick that a “person abandoned their privacy interest when they placed garbage for collection on their property in a way that was accessible to the public”.

“I find the privacy interest in garbage tossed onto a common property landscaped area is even more clearly abandoned,” Carmody wrote.

Overall, Carmody found the strata’s evidence more persuasive than Xu’s denial.