Privacy concerns over Ontario’s COVID-19 policy

Advocates and legal experts are raising concerns about potential privacy violations in the emergency orders the Ontario government has implemented to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The orders, which are currently in place until June 9 but will likely be extended further, allow first responders to access personal health details of residents who have tested positive for COVID-19.

The Progressive Conservative government says police, firefighters and paramedics need access to such information in order to protect themselves from contracting the virus while doing their jobs in the community.

But a group of advocates and public health workers say the orders are too broad and represent a significant privacy infringement.

They say first responders could make use of such data to target racialized and other marginalized communities.

They’re calling for the Ontario government to either cut off access to such data or build a firm “sunset clause” into the orders to ensure the information can’t be accessed in the future.

“We don’t know how long police are going to have access to this data, what they’re going to do to it,” said Alexander Mcclelland, a criminology scholar and spokesperson for an advocacy group dubbed We Can’t Police Our Way Out of a Pandemic.

“It’s also just an unjustified, unprecedented violation of privacy rights.”

Data access protocols are spelled out in section 120/20 of Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, which deals specifically with measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under that legislation, police, paramedics and firefighters are empowered to request personal information from labs or medical officers of health. The Act states that requesting parties would gain access to a person’s name, address, date of birth, and COVID-19 test results.

Mcclelland dismissed the government’s rationale as “a farce,” noting front-line workers such as cleaners, cashiers and delivery workers are also at risk of contracting the virus but don’t have the same access to information that’s tightly guarded in more typical times.