The Harper government is expected to introduce legislation that would give ordinary citizens more powers to slap invisible handcuffs on lawbreakers.

While merchants say they welcome greater freedom to carry out citizen arrests, some legal and security experts worry that the government could confer too much power upon citizens and encourage vigilantism.

“The traditional policy of the law has been to try and leave arrests up to the professionals — the police — wherever possible,” said Jonathan Dawe, a criminal lawyer and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.

“There is a concern that untrained citizens might arrest in situations where it isn’t really justified, and a further concern about citizens putting themselves in dangerous situations where someone — themselves, the person they are arresting or innocent bystanders — might get hurt.”

The recent debate was sparked when a shopkeeper in Toronto’s Chinatown, David Chen, was charged with assault and forcible confinement after he and two of his employees confronted a man who had stolen plants from the store an hour earlier, tied him up and threw him into the back of a van. Current law allows a citizen to make an arrest only while a crime is in progress.

Chen was ultimately acquitted of the charges, but the fact that he was charged at all upset fellow store owners and politicians. Liberal MP Joe Volpe and NDP MP Olivia Chow introduced private member’s bills aimed at loosening the restrictions on when a citizen can detain someone.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper also jumped into the fray, ordering government lawyers to look into changing the Criminal Code late last year and then making a personal visit to Chen this month.

Sara MacIntyre, a spokeswoman for Harper, said the issue is a “priority” for the prime minister and legislation will likely be tabled in February.

Those are encouraging words to Ralph Moyal, president of the Retail Merchants’ Association of Canada, who says changes to Canada’s citizen-arrest laws are long overdue.

“Honestly I’m disgusted by some of these laws. It’s about time these archaic laws were changed,” he said.

But Brian Robertson, a senior training associate at Toronto security consulting firm David Hyde & Associates, said he wonders if the pending Criminal Code changes are more about political opportunism than sound public policy.

It’s a “slam dunk” for the Conservatives because they’ve already got opposition support and it will be seen as showing that they care for the “little guy” and visible minorities, he said.

Robertson said there is “no solid argument” to expand citizen-arrest laws.

Any changes to the law are fraught with risk and, in some cases, could invite citizens to engage in “tracking people down.”

The current law is narrowly designed to give the public an option in emergency situations when no police are around, said Vancouver criminal lawyer Rishi Gill.

“In making the proposed change, we do need to ask, what is the outer limit of a private individual pursuing their own investigation?” Gill said. “I doubt the police would want this.”

A spokeswoman at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa said the force would not comment on proposed legislation.

But a restaurant manager in Kingston, Ont., who made a citizen’s arrest on a customer a couple of years ago under similar circumstances to the Chinatown case, said citizens should have the ability to detain someone if they feel they can do it safely.

Lori Feijo, manager of the Amadeus Cafe, said a nervous-looking customer abruptly left the restaurant one evening without paying. She and a co-worker later discovered that their personal belongings, including keys and wallets, had been stolen from a backroom.

About an hour later, the man returned to the restaurant — apparently not thinking staff had made the connection. Feijo confronted the man and told him she knew what he had done.

The man denied he had done anything and shoved her aside. She grabbed his arm and, with the help of co-workers, detained the man until police arrived.

It turned out the man had used their credit cards to make several purchases, including an Xbox 360 video game console and a room at a nearby hotel.

“If I didn’t hold this guy, I’d never see my stuff again,” she recalled. “He wasn’t going anywhere.”

Allowing citizens to take such action sends an important message to would-be criminals, Feijo added.

“You want to show people you don’t put up with it. Don’t come here an try to do that to me.”

dquan@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/dougquan