Information & Ethics committee  Do you want the long answer or the longer answer?

Information & Ethics committee  All right. The occasion for the concern is a number of complaints arose specifically around the decision by the provincial government to outsource to private sector service providers the delivery of certain public services, specifically the administration of the provincial healt

Information & Ethics committee  The committee contemplated by section 59 has not yet been struck. We're in the process of getting our brief together for the committee for when it is struck and the review actually begins. But certainly to the extent that I can provide the committee here with information in the c

Information & Ethics committee  Bearing in mind my initial lawyerly caveat around particular circumstances and general remarks, I think it's fair to say that the information you've described around the prescribing patterns of physicians, as opposed to patient information, on its face appears to fall certainly w

Information & Ethics committee  As a policy choice? It's not my place to make that kind of policy pronouncement, if you will, but I think clearly the legislature in B.C. has made that choice in defining “work product information” in the way it has because, as I say, on the face of it that kind of information--p

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know that I can usefully respond or make suggestions on that front. Clearly it's an issue that has been addressed through interpretation of the definition of “personal information” under PIPEDA--what is personal information about an individual. So whether or not it's nece

Information & Ethics committee  The short answer is no. The only legislation in Canada of which I'm aware that has that requirement is Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act. In British Columbia—and our legislation is up for its own statutory review, starting in the next few months—I would, if a

Information & Ethics committee  I'm a lawyer by trade—

Information & Ethics committee  —with the usual caveats. I'm sure I could find many others in the legal profession who might take issue with what I'm about to say, but I would suggest to you that the similarities among the laws across Canada far outweigh such minor differences as may exist, and an organization

Information & Ethics committee  There are nuances, so there will be some costs there to ensuring that you've ticked all the boxes, but it is not as onerous, as I said at the outset of my remarks, as some might suggest. I would suggest to you that in other jurisdictions—the United States, for example—the costs a

Information & Ethics committee  An organization, in principle, would be able to disclose one of its employees' salaries to a third party, the amount of the salary, but only if it was solely for a purpose reasonably required to, for example, maintain or terminate the employment relationship, and if that disclosu

Information & Ethics committee  I have two quick points in response. If the information is aggregated payroll, it is almost certainly not information about an identifiable individual, so it's not caught as personal information. It is therefore not covered by PIPA. Our PIPA also has a special set of rules aro

Information & Ethics committee  You can.

Information & Ethics committee  So even if it were personal information, consent is not required for the purposes of enrolment and maintenance of those plans.

Information & Ethics committee  I understand that the experience here, generally speaking, is that there is good compliance on the part of federally regulated organizations. Again, perhaps as the legislation becomes better known, and there's more and more experience with it.... Even if we didn't have the order-