Brian Da Costa will not be getting out of jail. On Monday, according to CBC News, Justice Shaun Nakatsuru of the Ontario Superior Court dismissed an application by Da Costa’s lawyers to review an earlier ruling that revoked his bail in May. The 44-year-old, who police describe as a drug trafficker, remains in custody facing nine charges.
The judge’s reasons, and nearly everything said at the hearing, sit behind a routine publication ban meant to protect Da Costa’s right to a fair trial. The public is told the outcome but not the argument. That is the law, and in a case like this it cannot be helped. It still means that one of the more alarming allegations ever made against a Toronto police officer is being weighed where the public cannot watch.
The charges include bribing a peace officer, trafficking in drugs and in police uniforms, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. None has been tested in court.
A plate number, a database, an attempted killing
The case grows out of Project South, the investigation York Regional Police opened in June 2025 after they broke up what they say was a plot to kill a senior official of the Toronto South Detention Centre. The official’s name is under a publication ban, for that person’s own safety. Less than a month before the attempted hit, investigators say, Toronto police Constable Timothy Barnhardt ran an unauthorized search of the official’s licence plate. He is accused of passing what he found to Da Costa, a civilian.
According to a court filing in the case — an information to obtain, the document police swear out when they want a search warrant — intercepted communications showed that Barnhardt “routinely sold confidential database information to known criminal associate Da Costa, often at Da Costa’s direction.” Read that sentence slowly. A serving constable, paid by the public to hold the keys to the police database, allegedly sold what was in it, on request, to a man the police themselves call a criminal.
The alleged buyer now sits in a cell, and the word “alleged” matters; Da Costa is charged, not convicted, and his day in court is still to come. But the shape of the accusation deserves to be stated without varnish. The complaint is not that one officer had one weak moment. It is that confidential police information — the kind ordinary people are required to hand over and forbidden to see — was, in the police’s own account, a commodity, with a regular customer. Whoever else ends up in the dock, the Toronto Police Service has some plain questions to answer about who could search what, and why nobody noticed.