A better balance

When Toronto’s Ellen Richardson was prevented from crossing the U.S. border in 2013 because of an earlier suicide attempt, she felt harassed and humiliated.

But never could she have imagined her case would prompt an outpouring of protests, including a legal action and a scathing report from Ontario’s privacy commissioner, as well as a Star investigation and a petition from hundreds of medical students.

But demands that Toronto police stop automatically entering suicide attempts into the Canadian Police Information System (CPIC), a national database operated by the RCMP that U.S. border guards can access, have finally paid off.

In a report to the Toronto Police Services board released this week, Chief Mark Saunders announcedthat steps have been taken to prevent U.S. border officials from automatically accessing records about suicide attempts by Canadians.

His action is most welcome. The information Toronto police were inputting into the database was responsible for blocking many people, including Richardson, from entering the United States simply because police were called during a past mentalhealth crisis.

Ontario’s former privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, protested that practice, wrote a scathing report on it last year, and finally took Toronto police to court over it. She was right to do so.

The steps Toronto police have now taken in conjunction with the RCMP are not exactly what Cavoukian had in mind when she went to court to stop Toronto police from disclosing that private information.

She had asked that Toronto police stop including all suicide attempts in the national police database. In fact, she found that police services in Hamilton, Ottawa, Waterloo and the Ontario Provincial Police were much more selective in what they posted.

In the end, the Toronto force worked with the RCMP to limit the kind of information in the database that U.S. officials can see.

As a result, American border guards are now able to view suicide records only when the attempt involved serious violence or harm to others, or appeared to be intended to provoke a lethal response from police.

In his letter to the board, Saunders said the new protocol “balances public safety with the need to protect Canadians’ privacy.”

It’s a good solution to a problem that has taken too long to solve.

U.S. border guards will now be blocked from seeing most Canadian suicide records