The federal treasury is pocketing more than a billion dollars a year in unclaimed benefits owed to retirees, newly-disclosed records show. At least 254,000 Canadians entitled to monthly cheques have failed to apply for them, said the Department of Employment: “This is breathtaking”.
Cabinet has introduced a DNA privacy bill that exempts insurance companies rated the “biggest abusers” of genetic information. The bill introduced in the last days of the 41st Parliament would make DNA a prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act: “This is lip service”.
The immediate fate of C-377 rests with the Speaker of the Senate as legislators last night concluded debate on whether the contentious labour bill is in order. Conservative and Liberal critics challenged the legality of the measure under parliamentary rules: “The question now is what to do”.
Cabinet must work harder to alert consumers to health risks of new drug products, says the Council of Canadian Academies. The warnings over ineffectual disclosure of risks comes ahead of new drug labelling regulations to take effect this week: ‘This is not insurmountable’.
Federal privacy complaints increased 55 percent last year, says Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien. Issues included subscriber protests over data mining by Bell Canada: “The inbox is inundated”.
The Canadian Transportation Agency is silent on whether it will appeal a court order that it stop concealing documents cited in regulatory decisions. The disclosure order followed a legal challenge by an airline passenger rights’ advocate who accuses the Agency of “collusion” with industry.
“This is a very important ruling that upholds the constitutional principal that judicial proceedings should be transparent,” said Dr. Gábor Lukács of Halifax; “These same documents are public at any federal court – affidavits, submissions, statements of claim – and they should be public at the Transportation Agency.”
The Agency declined comment on the case. Lukács sued after staff censored submissions it used in rejecting claims for compensation by a family bumped from an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Cancun, Mexico in 2012. Redactions in the file included the name of the airline’s attorney and statements from other passengers, Lukács said.
“They were stonewalling over something that was actually silly,” said Lukács. “We’re not talking about nuclear secrets. They were using the Privacy Act as a smokescreen.”
Other regulatory agencies like the Canadian Radio Television & Telecommunications Commission routinely publish all documents and industry submissions cited in regulatory decisions. In the Air Canada case, the Agency withheld information it considered confidential after publishing the Cancun decision on its website.
Court of Appeal Justice C. Michael Ryer, a former tax attorney, ruled the Agency breached the “open court principle which generally requires that such proceedings, the materials in the record before the court and the resulting decision must be open for public scrutiny.”
“The term ‘publicly available’ appears to me to be relatively precise and unequivocal,” Judge Ryer wrote; “I interpret these words as meaning available to or accessible by the citizenry at large.”
“These rights of access to court proceedings, documents and decisions are grounded in common law, as an element of the rule of law, and in the Constitution as an element of the protection accorded to free expression,” Judge Ryer added.
The Agency mediates disputes in air travel, marine and rail shipping. The disclosure order did not appear to be of any obvious benefit in commercial disagreements, said Robert Ballantyne, president of the Freight Management Association of Canada.
“It’s useful to see background information, but for instance in final offer arbitration over rail rates — that kind of information is commercially sensitive and would not be released,” said Ballantyne; “No member of ours has ever gone to the mat on this. Commercial disagreements are obviously different than when you’re dealing with airline passengers.”
Lukács said he sued for access to Agency records after concluding its handling of the Cancun passengers’ claim “sounded very fishy to me”; “My sense of the Agency is there’s systemic bias against passengers without evidence, without cross-examination, nothing. I saw a lack of due process,” he said.
“What is disturbing is the collusion between the Agency and industry,” Lukács said. “They have said documents are redacted in consultation with industry; there is no record of it; this is just an informal arrangement. To my mind that is collusion.”
Members of the Agency include Sam Barone, former chief lobbyist for the Canadian Business Aviation Association, appointed to the regulator by cabinet in 2013. “Just because a party asks for confidentiality doesn’t mean the agency has to grant it without a legal test on whether any potential damage from disclosure outweighs the public’s right to know,” Lukács said.
The court ordered regulators to release its uncensored files, and awarded Lukács $750 plus costs.
By Tom Korski 
The federal agency that regulates payment card operators like Visa and MasterCard has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the industry, newly-released records show. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada did not comment on the corporate subsidies: “The agency really hasn’t done anything for merchants and consumers”.
Cabinet is appealing a judge’s ruling that the fisheries department breached regulations when it sanctioned the transfer of diseased fish by one of Canada’s largest aquaculture salmon producers. Government attorneys filed Federal Court of Appeal documents claiming the judgment followed “erroneous” facts and “inadmissible” evidence: “We need to set the record straight”.
Canadian regulators have done little to ease the “red tape nightmares” of interprovincial trade, says an employers’ advocate. A members’ survey found a large proportion of companies rate it easier to do business in the U.S. than neighbouring provinces, according to the CFIB: “Do these barriers make sense?”
Parliament is bracing for more citizens’ participation after quietly shelving its 148-year tradition of accepting only paper petitions. The Commons this October will accept internet petitions with the election of a new Parliament: “We anticipate a lot of interest”.
The Commons has rejected a motion to limit cabinet’s use of funds earmarked for employment insurance. It follows a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that the government was entitled to spend billions in workers’ premiums on federal programs: “This is wrong and it needs to be protected”.
Canada Post “bought and paid for” research that mistakenly projected mammoth deficits as justification for service cuts, says the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. The union in a research paper questioned the “impartiality” of Conference Board figures cited by the Crown corporation: ‘Cabinet endorsed the plan from beginning to end’.
A federal probe targeting Apple Canada Inc. is expanding as investigators search through telecom documents dating from 2008. The anti-trust Competition Bureau is asking a federal judge to compel Canada’s largest telecom firms to surrender iPhone sales agreements: ‘It’s millions of transactions’.
Canada is one of the few fat industrialized countries without a sugar tax, says the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. An OECD researcher told Senate obesity hearings any new Canadian tax should be steep to be effective: “Everything you drink is part of a business, and the business model is to get you to drink more”.
Cabinet has formally approved competing ombudsmen’s services for unhappy bank customers in a decision rated confusing and unfair to consumers. A private company, ADR Chambers, effective August 5 will be legally recognized as an ombudsman for banks that pulled out of an industry-wide mediation program: “It is a confusing system”.
