On March 8th of this year, arbitrator Kinzie held that an employer did not breach the British Columbia PIPA by disclosing amounts earned by bargaining unit members to their certified bargaining agent. He made the following principled statement about when the exception to the PIPA consent rule would be engaged by disclosures by an employer to bargaining agent:
As the party to the collective agreement with the Employer, which agreement governs the terms and conditions of employment of the Employer’s employees, the Union, in my view, is an equal partner with the Employer to those employment relationships. They have the same legitimate interest in the management of those relationships. Therefore, I am of the view that the disclosure of employee personal information by the Employer to the Union regarding employees in the Union’s bargaining unit that is relevant to a matter concerning the interpretation and/or the application of the collective agreement would not violate Section 19 of the Personal Information Protection Act if their consent was not obtained because such disclosure, in my view, would be “reasonable” for the purposes of “managing” an employment relationship governed by the terms of that agreement.
Notably, the employer had called the BC OIPC for advice and was apparently told “definitely NOT [to] turn that info over to anybody.”
Comox Valley Distribution Ltd. v United Steelworkers, Local 1-1937, 2017 CanLII 72391 (BC LA).
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