Last year, the City of Yellowknife was caught with its pants down when an apparently disgruntled employee stole hundreds of emails from former senior administrative officer Dennis Kefalas, which were then leaked to the press.
They contained a fair amount of mundane and daily correspondences with city staff. But there were also a number of emails concerning private citizens, some of them attached to various controversies.
This week, Yellowknifer learned that Kefalas is leaving the city next month as director of public works, the position he held before and after his time as senior administrative officer. No reason was given but some of his leaked emails play a significant role in the inquiry launched by the city into accusations of harassment and sexual misconduct by the manager of municipal enforcement, Doug Gillard.
Citing the emails and the privacy breaches that resulted, Elaine Keenan Bengts, the information and privacy commissioner of the Northwest Territories, is once again calling on the territorial government to include municipalities in access to information and protection of privacy legislation.
She has been fighting this lonely battle for the past 21 years. Alas, until the GNWT allows Keenan Bengts to grows some teeth so she can enforce her rulings as commissioner, Yellowknifer will not be joining her in her quest.
The simple fact is, privacy and access to information legislation in the territory is a sham. As far as we can tell, its sole purpose is to allow governments to profess accountability while spraying clouds of squid ink behind them as they dart for the shadows.
We know this by experience.
In 2014, Yellowknifer submitted an access to information request to the NWT Power Corporation for records on the involvement of its then-chair Brendan Bell with a pitch to link the Taltson and Snare hydroelectric power systems to a spur north to the diamond mines. Bell was also vice-president of Dominion Diamond Corporation at the time.
Power corp. sent back records but with the names of the mines blacked out, plus other details, such as on the economic impact of the mines.
Yellowknifer appealed to Keenan Bengts to have the records released. She ruled in our favour on some of the information but not on the names of the mines.
It was then that we learned to obtain even the information she ruled should be disclosed, we would have to sue the government. The GNWT-appointed privacy commissioner has no power to enforce her rulings with fines or any other sanctions, nor the purse to pursue her rulings in court.
So there we were – no privacy commissioner in sight: an editor on one side, a phalanx of paid-by-the-hour GNWT lawyers at the other – all of them surely keeping a detailed account of the legal costs to be dropped on our heads should we take our request for information all the way to trial in NWT Supreme Court and eventually give up or lose.
Needless to say, we backed out. If the free press can get crushed seeking information from the government, what does this mean for ordinary residents?
From our experience, the city has generally been better at providing information than the GNWT. This is purely anecdotal, of course. The city can still frustrate our efforts. We recently asked how many city employees have filed complaints since council approved a whistle-blower policy last fall.
Our request was denied but given our past experiences with GNWT-legislated information controls, we fail to see how including the city under this umbrella will improve the flow of information.
The same goes for breaches of privacy. Yellowknifer can point to numerous stories in recent years where the GNWT lost track of all kinds of private information, including the most sensitive kind, such as patient medical files. How effective has privacy legislation been in preventing those breaches? The answer seems pretty obvious to us.
Until politicians are willing to give the privacy and information commissioner the backbone needed to hold governments accountable, so she has power behind her words, we see little point in extending legislation to the city that will only give it cover when its bureaucrats decide to say “no.”