Ottawa By-law and Algonquin College poster boy secretly recorded women

Former Ottawa By-law officer Andrew Seangio is the last guy you’d want mentoring young women enrolled in Algonquin College’s police foundations program.

Still, he was literally the poster boy on promotional material for the college and Ottawa By-law, and he was highly recommended by some instructors, particularly when it came to training for physical requirements.

After all, there was a gym at his Ottawa apartment building, and the shower in his unit was always available.

What Seangio didn’t tell the women was that he was secretly filming them in the bathroom as they showered and used the toilet, starting back in 2011.

The former by-law officer’s voyeurism was finally exposed in a thorough Ottawa police investigation that yielded a pile of charges, and this week Ontario Court Justice Norman Boxall found Seangio guilty of 33 counts.

Seangio, an Ottawa By-law officer at the time, tried to explain it away by saying the women knew they were being recorded because they had had a conversation about recording sex in the bathroom. But the women — all eight of them — testified they had no idea they were being filmed.

Not only did they say there was no discussion about having sex, let alone recording it, some said they locked the bathroom door for privacy as they used the toilet or showered after hitting the gym.

Boxall, after analyzing the evidence, rejected Seangio’s story that the video recordings had been consensual.

Boxall said the story didn’t make any sense, and in some cases, defied human experiences.

For example, he noted, why would a woman lock the bathroom door for privacy if they had planned to have sex with Seangio in the shower while being recorded? The judge noted that their desire for privacy was clear because they locked the bathroom door.

The judge rejected Seangio’s evidence, saying it wasn’t reliable or credible, and ruled there was no consent for the recordings, designed “for his pleasure.”

The mentor for aspiring officers was later hired as a Mountie in British Columbia. He was convicted by a jury last year for indecent acts in front of girls outside a private school in Richmond, B.C. He was sentenced to 18 months.

The former Mountie, 38, is awaiting a sentencing hearing on the 33 convictions for voyeurism in Ottawa.

Senior Assistant Crown Attorney Suzanne Schriek, who led the prosecution, told court this week she would be seeking a significant jail sentence.

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