Mr. Chair, perhaps I could tell the committee a bit more about the facts of the case I was talking about in which this came up. As a general principle, privacy trumps access.
The case had to do with a request to the Information Commissioner. It was my colleague's case, in fact, a request from a CBC producer who was interested in accessing the results of this CADRIS database about adverse drug reactions. I can ask Ms. Kosseim to supplement my remarks, because she actually worked on this case.
As I understand it, Health Canada had all the personal information. The issue was not that Health Canada didn't have many fields; I think there were 60 or 80 fields, and most of these fields could be released to the journalist. The issue was with the fields the Information Commissioner did not release. The debate was about the province field. “Province” is not generally thought of as being personal information, but Health Canada's position--with which we concurred--was that if you released the province field, in certain cases that field, coupled with obituary notices, would allow journalists to understand who exactly had died and just release their information.
I don't think, Mr. Chairman, that any of this hampers Health Canada or the scientific study of adverse drug reaction in any way. In fact, they did have the name.