Your question concerns a number of issues. I do not know whether the Blackberry belonging to your colleague was provided by the government, so if it met government standards. In principle, it should be encrypted. From what I have understood, government Blackberrys are encrypted—the ones at my office are. Perhaps it would be a good idea to protect them with a very good password.
This brings me to one of the audits that we conducted, which suggests that the PIN to PIN function is not used. When the PIN to PIN function is used, it seems, according to my experts, that the department or Parliament server is not being used. So, the signal can be intercepted by quite basic equipment.
Finding one's personal information on a Blackberry is not necessarily bad, to the extent that no one had access to it because it is protected by a password.