Privacy watchdog ‘erred’
P.E.I. government launches legal challenge against commissioner
The P.E.I. government has launched a legal challenge against P.E.I.’s privacy watchdog, saying she “erred in law” when she found government breached the privacy of three individuals on two separate occasions.
The province has filed for a judicial review of two orders issued this summer by privacy commissioner Karen Rose. The province argues Rose did not properly consider government’s duty to collect and preserve public records under the Archives and Records Act when she found government disclosed three individuals’ personal information inappropriately in two separate orders. One of the orders deals with concerns dating back to 2010 involving a consultant’s report on the now-defunct Eastern School District board of elected trustees. The report was leaked to the CBC and later tabled in the legislature. It named three female trustees and detailed accusations made against them of bullying, aggression and accused them of being the cause of major conflict and dysfunction within the school board at that time.
Rose found the Eastern School District, which has since become the Public Schools Branch, breached the three trustees’ privacy by forwarding this report to the education minister at the time, Doug Currie, without redacting the names of the three women. She also found the leak of the report to the CBC and the fact Currie later tabled the report in the legislature were also breaches of the women’s privacy.
She ordered the department to allow the women to prepare a statement of disagreement relating to their personal information in the report and that it be annotated to all copies of the report in the department’s custody. The second order involves the Department of Workforce and Advanced Learning. An individual who applied to a professional body for a licence to practice was having trouble getting his credentials recognized. When he appealed to the department for help, he found government had collected information about him from a community organization with which he was also involved. The man raised concern about the community organization and government exchanging his personal information. Rose found the public body improperly disclosed this man’s personal information.
The province is challenging these two decisions in its application for a judicial review.
In a statement to The Guardian, a spokeswoman for the justice department said the legal challenge is not an attempt to fight the privacy commissioner’s orders, but rather to “give us the time to collaborate with the commissioner on how to best respond to the issues mentioned in her decisions.”
“The decisions did not specifically mention the Archives and Records Act, but do have potential implications under this act. Asking for judicial review will give us time to work with the information and privacy commissioner to better understand how the decisions apply to the Archives and Records Act,” the spokeswoman said, adding that government expected this legal issue to be resolved without going through the full judicial review process.
“We need to seek clarity on the implications so government employees have clear direction on how to adhere to these two important pieces of legislation and the orders of the information and privacy commissioner.”
The province says the case is being handled by internal government legal counsel using existing resources.