A friend just brought a notable FIPPA judicial review from February 24th to my attention. In it, the Divisional Court affirmed an IPC order to disclose the full names of FRO employees in response to a request for personal information.
The IPC held that the employment-related records exclusion in FIPPA did not apply to certain records containing employee names – records of services provided to the requester. The Court reviewed this on the reasonableness standard, finding that pre-Alberta Teachers‘ case law supporting a review on the correctness standard no longer applies. On the application of the exclusion, the Court rejected an argument that the records of service provided were employment-related in the context:
To qualify for the exclusion, the record must be about labour relations or employment-related matters. The dictionary definition of the word “about” requires that the record do more than have some connection to or some relationship with a labour relations matter. “About” means “on the subject of” or “concerning”: see Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., 2004, s.v. “about”. This means that to qualify for the exclusion the subject matter of the record must be a labour relations or employment-related matter.
Adopting the Ministry’s broad interpretation of “about” would mean that a routine operational record or portion of a record connected with the core mandate of a government institution could be excluded from the scope of the Act because such a record could potentially be connected to an employment-related concern, is touched upon in a collective agreement, or could become the subject of a grievance. This interpretation would subvert the principle of openness and public accountability that the Act is designed to foster.
This should be read to be consistent with the Divisional Court’s earlier decision that there need only be “some connection” with excluded subject matter for the exclusion to apply: see Ministry of Attorney General and Toronto Star, 2010 ONSC 991 (CanLII). Records that have some connection (i.e. a partial connection) to excluded subject matter are arguably still excluded, but the connection must be real, not speculative and not driven by the context in which a request is made.
The Court also affirmed the IPC’s finding that full name information is not exempt under the “unjustified invasion of personal privacy” exemption.
Question. Why not argue that the information at issue – full names or identifying information – is not “personal information” to which the right of access to personal information applies? The right of access to personal information applies to information and not whole records. In the absence of a special context, the identity of employee/service provider names should not constitute the requester/service recipient’s personal information.
Ministry of Community and Social Services v Doe et al (2014), 120 O.R. (3d) 451.
All About Information 