Nunavut info and privacy boss shoulders ever-growing demand

Nunavut’s information and privacy commissioner, Elaine Keenan Bengts. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)

Nunavut’s information and privacy commissioner says the territorial government should consider expanding her office to deal with the growing demand for access to information and review of privacy issues, which hit record highs in 2013-14.

In most Canadian provinces, “the average file load for a full-time investigator is about 30 files,” commissioner Elaine Keenan Bengts told regular Nunavut MLAs, Sept. 18, at a hearing of the Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on Oversight of Government Operations and Public Accounts.

“I am a part-time commissioner,” said Keenan Bengts, who also serves as information and privacy commissioner for the Northwest Territories.

“My Nunavut caseload now is about 20 active files, and in the Northwest Territories, I have a similar amount. Finding the necessary time to meet all my responsibilities has become an issue,” she said.

Based in Yellowknife, Keenan Bengts has been Nunavut’s only commissioner since the territory’s creation in 1999, and has served as the NWT’s commissioner since 1997.

She said she would be willing to close her family law practice to focus “100 per cent on my role as information and privacy commissioner in both the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.”

Keenan Bengts suggested that a full-time commissioner would have to take the job within the next five or six years, hire staff, and possibly occupy a permanent office in Nunavut.

The commissioner’s views are contained in her office’s annual report for the fiscal year 2013-14, which she made public Sept. 18.

Her office opened a total of 23 files in that period, nine of which were privacy issues, and eight of which were access to information requests.

This marks a slight increase over the previous year’s 21 files, only one of which was a privacy issue while 10 were access to information requests.

Most noteworthy for 2013-14 was an unprecedented number of privacy issues to address, which Keenan Bengts took as a positive sign.

“My sense is that it has more to do with the fact that the public is generally becoming more aware of privacy issues in their day-to-day lives,” she told the standing committee.

Local housing organizations were identified in three of the commissioner’s privacy case files in 2013-2014 and Keenan Bengts was critical of how they are currently handled.

LHOs administer and maintain public housing in all communities of the territory, but they are not officially considered public agencies and are therefore exempt from the territory’s Access to Information and Privacy Protection Act.

“Local housing organizations collect considerable amounts of personal information and have significant power over important GN (Government of Nunavut) funds,” Keenan Bengts told the standing committee. “In these circumstances, they should clearly be subject to both the access and the privacy provisions of the act.”

The organizations report to the Nunavut Housing Corp., which is considered a public body. As such, the corporation “has been dealing with the complaints about LHOs, but it’s very inefficient,” she said.

Her annual report’s top recommendation calls for LHOs to be included among the public bodies listed in the regulations.

“The Nunavut Housing Corp. is very supportive of my recommendation,” Keenan Bengts told standing committee chair George Hickes, the MLA for Iqaluit-Tasiluk.

“They have concerns, to be fair, I think, legitimate political concerns about calling LHOs ‘public bodies,’” she said.

“We talked about the possibility of creating another category of organizations that are subject to the act, so that they’re not being called public bodies. That’s where we left it at this morning.”

Also included in the report’s recommendations is a call for complete proactive disclosure of government contracts.

“A very high percentage of individuals and companies,” in Nunavut rely, to a “very large degree, on government contracts for their livelihood,” the commissioner’s annual report states.

“The more of this information that can be made proactively available, the less room there is for any charge of favouritism, nepotism, fraud or other allegations of improper considerations.”

Other recommendations in the annual report include the following, which Keenan-Bengts repeated from past reports:

• the need for health-specific privacy legislation. Nunavut is the only Canadian jurisdiction without such laws, the report says. The Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Prince Edward Island “have all passed health-specific legislation over the last year, and are in the process of implementation.”

• Inclusion of municipalities in “some form” of information access and/or privacy legislation. “I would encourage the Government of Nunavut to engage municipal and community governments to establish and implement privacy policies as a starting point.”

Keenan Bengts’ third term of office as commissioner ends in the spring of 2015, when it may be renewed for another five-year term.