Thank you for the question.
I was actually very surprised when I saw this in the report from the Privacy Commissioner, because I have a letter from last May telling me this file was closed.
Perhaps I could just take a minute and explain the two principal activities that we are concerned with at the Public Service Commission. We have a broad mandate to protect the political impartiality of the public service. There are two parts of this mandate. One is if public servants want to run for political office, they must come to the commission for permission to run and we determine whether their running would in any way compromise the non-partisan nature of the public service.
It has a lot to do with the kind of job they do, the kind of job they go back to if they lose, and the conditions that are imposed when they are campaigning. There are some technicalities where the commission has to be very involved because of the structure of the law.
The second part of the act says that public servants should not be active in such a way that it compromises the non-partisan nature of the public service, so it's speeches, signs, participation in campaigns, but not necessarily being a candidate.
For us to discharge this, we have done two things. One, for those people who are candidates, we do monitor that very closely. We do follow up particularly when they're still working in campaigning. We follow a lot. We scrutinize closely to make sure they adhere to the conditions. We also do some checking when there are a number of campaigns to see if any of the candidates are public servants and they didn't come to us.
With respect to the other general activity, it's just general media monitoring. The first thing that the Privacy Commissioner did was put those two activities together. It was fairly intensive for a very select number of people who were candidates but not for the others. She goes on to say that we have databases that put together opinions, political affiliations, personal causes, hobbies, religious affiliations, and group memberships of past and present public servants. We have never done that, we will not do that, and we are not going to do that.