Part of Canada’s national rock collection is being thrown away to make room in an Ottawa warehouse. The Canadian Geological Survey said it will dump tons of minerals and soil samples carefully collected for scientific research: “It should have been offered to others”.
Tax attorneys who face Law Society investigations on clients’ complaints cannot invoke confidentiality on their files, a court has ruled. Two tax lawyers had claimed their clients faced possible criminal prosecution if their tax files fell into Canada Revenue’s hands: “Solicitor-client privilege belongs to the client”.
A bill introduced in the Commons would save small business owners, farmers and fishermen thousands of dollars in federal tax with the sale of the family company to children. Forty-eight percent of small proprietors are over age 50, according to Statistics Canada: “This bill seeks to address an injustice”.
Railways are protesting higher insurance costs under new federal liability rules prompted by the Lac-Mégantic disaster. A five-fold increase in coverage for short line railways will cost jobs and affect service, executives say: “Where do we find the money to pay for this?”
The RCMP is paying a British Columbia publisher $174,000 for crime coverage. The Mounties said the contract is needed to publicize work of the province’s anti-gang unit: “We run our papers like everybody else”.
The Senate has passed into law a cabinet bill limiting pipeline operators’ spill liability at a billion dollars. Pipeline accidents are equivalent to a teaspoon per barrel of oil shipped in Canada, the Senate was told: “The government’s goal is zero incidents”.
The nation’s garbage output remains steady at 25 million tonnes a year despite recycling schemes, according to Statistics Canada. Waste managers say the data confirm worries that landfilling remains cost-effective and commonplace: “You have a fundamental problem”.
Parliament will enact what one MP dubbed a “sleeper” law allowing cabinet to enact new regulations without public scrutiny. The bill ends a tradition dating from 1841 that requires all new federal regulations be plainly disclosed: “It deserves to receive a lot more attention in the media than it has”.
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”.
