In Alberta, under all three of the statutes that I have oversight for, there are offences and penalties.
Under the FOIP Act the offences tend to be wilful contraventions of the legislation and not just a negligent human error type of incident—which is the sort of thing we mediate and make recommendations around—but wilfully not complying with the legislation, or for example destroying records that are subject to the act, or directing someone else to do that with the intent of evading an access request.
The penalties under the legislation include for individuals a fine of not less than $2,000 and not more than $10,000, and in the case of other persons a fine of not less than $200,000 and not more than $500,000.
I should note we have not had any successful prosecutions under the FOIP Act. On the other hand under our health legislation, which has similar offences and slightly different penalties, we have conducted a number of offence investigations that have resulted in successful prosecutions in court. We do the investigation, we turn our evidence over to the crown, and the crown conducts the prosecution. I believe we've had four successful prosecutions in Alberta, and this year under the Health Information Act we've had charges laid in four other offences.
Under the Health Information Act these tend to be wilfully snooping in other people's health information. I think one of the reasons we see more of that in the health sector than we do in the public sector has to do with the fact that in the public sector most of the cases in front of our office have to do with access to information. Complaints around snooping don't make up the majority of the cases in front of the office. We're far more likely to be looking at a response to a request for access and whether the information was improperly withheld. It's not always an easy thing to find evidence that somebody has wilfully destroyed records to evade a request.
I think it's the nature of the types of files that have led to prosecutions under the Health Information Act and not so much under the access to information act.