My initial thought is that there is a distinction between going to court to force government to do what it legally is supposed to do and preventing it from doing what it legally is not supposed to do: kind of your classic judicial review, or the implementation of an order to do or not to do something.
When it comes to harm to individuals that has happened in connection with these sorts of things, I would, first of all, want to make sure that there is nothing in the Privacy Act that cuts off that possibility. There is a section in there already that says that no government institution, crown servant, or otherwise, has any liability for any action it takes in good faith under the legislation. That has been used by the federal Department of Justice to say, “We are immune to lawsuits.” That was thrown out by the Federal Court of Appeal in a hearing I was involved with in April.
Again, you want to make sure that individuals who are in fact harmed—because we are seeing an increasing recognition in the case law, in the evolution of the common law in Canada and the civil code in Quebec, that privacy harms can be significant.