Tax Court has ruled litigants have no automatic right to privacy even if case details are personally embarrassing. A judge dismissed a claim by one taxpayer who feared publication made him look like an incompetent businessman: “The right of the public to access the courts is considered one of necessity rather than convenience.”
An Ottawa lawyer is attempting to certify a federal class action lawsuit over government pension errors. An estimated 250,000 employees and retirees, mainly women, are affected by mistakes in calculating benefits, according to a Federal Court application.
“The government screwed up the records for women who went on maternity leave dating from the 1990s,” said lawyer Eric Letts of Letts Law. “We’re fairly confident it’s global and, if it’s not all women, it’s most of them.”
Letts in a Court application alleges the public works department responsible for pension benefits credited employees with pensionable earnings they never had, then provided retirees with misleading estimates of expected benefits. “I’ve been on this file for a year-and-a-half, and through Access To Information we found out they knew about the mistake but just said, ‘Screw it, we’ll figure it out later,’” said Letts.
Letts estimated damages of $15,000 to $50,000 for a quarter-million federal employees and retirees. “This never could happen in the private sector,” said Letts. “The government has made these errors on the records of people on maternity leave in the 1990s and they don’t have a system to fix it.”
Laura Prevost, an Ottawa retiree and lead plaintiff in the case, worked as a federal employee from 1986 to 2015. In a Court application, Prevost explained that supervisors credited her for pension payments she never made while on maternity leave and other absences from work.
“Unknown to her at the time, the government had a practice of reporting pension contributions to the Canada Revenue Agency as if she, and other women, had contributed to their pensions all year despite the fact they did not make such contributions,” Prevost’s lawyer wrote the Court.
Prevost said she even requested an audit in 2003 after suspecting her pension contributions “seemed incorrect”, but was assured no accounting error occurred. Only on retirement did Prevost learn her actual benefits were lower than promised.
“There is no recourse,” said Attorney Letts. “You have to sue them or just put up with it.”
Court documents include staff emails obtained by Letts through Access To Information in which officials admitted to errors. “It is best not to discuss any of this with the plan member for the moment,” said a 2016 email. “A complete review is required.”
Letts seeks to certify a class action lawsuit on behalf of “all current or former female employees” from the 1990s who took leave without pay to have children, care for relatives or relocate with a spouse. “These women suffer damages from relying on the misinformation respecting their pension information when they are making decisions for common life events such as divorce and retirement,” Letts wrote the Court.
Letts noted women employees who took unpaid leave typically opted out of pension payments temporarily “based on the ethos of the times, that women were more likely to remain off work to attend to child care; a woman’s income was secondary to her husband’s income; and other such gender-based assumptions.”
The public works department does not comment on pending litigation.
By Jason Unrau 
Nearly two-thirds of Canadians, 63 percent, skipped Veterans’ Week observances despite millions spent on a federal ad campaign, new data show. A bill awaiting a Third Reading vote in the Commons would designate November 11 a legal holiday: “Why?”
Federal Court for the second time in two months has cited the Department of Employment for poor enforcement of migrant labour rules. The latest judgment follows a critical audit that complained of weak management of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program: “The most basic requirements were not met in this case.”
Saskatchewan’s Court of Appeal has struck down a contract that saw a First Nation billed $450 an hour with bonuses for negotiating a federal land claim. Courts will “not tolerate any sharp practice” by attorneys, a judge wrote: “A client should not need to verify the truth of what their lawyer is telling them.”
More than a quarter of Canadians, 27 percent, say they’ve driven under the influence of cannabis, according to federal research obtained through Access To Information. The findings should prompt cabinet to delay a bill to legalize marijuana, said an MP: ‘The mixed messages are troubling.’
Environmental groups are rated more trustworthy than pesticide manufacturers or the Minister of Health, says an in-house federal study. Nearly a third of Canadians surveyed, 30 percent, said they had no confidence in the agency responsible for monitoring pesticides: “They tended to focus on the negative.”
The Liberal chair of the Commons finance committee is questioning a budget proposal to perpetually increase user fees by the annual inflation rate. Automatic revenue gains strip incentives for government to become more efficient, said MP Wayne Easter: “That’s one of the problems I have with this approach.”
The Canada Revenue Agency spent the equivalent of more than $400,000 apiece on political audits of the Canadian Council of Churches and other charities, data show. One MP said the costly investigations looked like a witch hunt: “They wanted to put these people out of business.”
Blacklock’s pauses for the Victoria Day holiday with best wishes to subscribers and friends. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
It was a fairy tale game.
The Icelandic soccer team
beat England at the
2016 European Championship.
Some speculate
how the Nordic nation celebrated.
Nine months later,
a surge in baby deliveries
is reported by
Reykjavik hospitals.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
An Access To Information memo says federal agencies have simply ignored a 2004 law requiring transparency on user fees. A former MP who wrote the Act said non-compliance was inexplicable: “How can you not comply with an Act of Parliament?”
Canadians will pay more for home heating, driving and air travel under a federal carbon tax, says a Technical Paper. Only “certain farming activities” – not specified – will be exempt from the tax. Environment Canada said details will be spelled out in pending legislation: “Canadians across this country support action on climate change.”
MPs yesterday made short work of a Conservative bill on border regulations prompted by an international incident. The Commons took just 36 minutes to approve the bill in principle at Second Reading and refer it to committee: “Canadians are kind, welcoming and fair; we are not aggressors.”
A former Parks Canada CEO says zoos and aquariums help bring Canadians back to nature. The retired executive appealed to the Senate fisheries committee to be wary of a bill banning the sale and breeding of whales in captivity: “They can ignite that spark and excitement in young Canadians to care for nature.”
