Sask. FOI legislation overdue for overhaul, commissioner says

The internet was still young when Saskatchewan brought in its first freedom of information law in the early 1990s, but now it's time to revamp that legislation to reflect the vast expansion of the online universe, says the province's information and privacy commissioner.

Large online databases and powerful search engines like Google have cropped up in the 16 years since Saskatchewan's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act came into being, Gary Dickson said in his annual report. But while all other provinces in the west and most other Canadian jurisdictions have extensively revised and modernized their access to information and privacy laws, Saskatchewan has not.

One shortfall of the current legislation is that it's deficient in dealing with privacy breaches by Saskatchewan public bodies and Crown corporations, said Dickson while discussing the report with media Thursday.

The 1992 law allows people to request public records from provincial government ministries and Crown corporations for a nominal fee and provides protections that ensure personal information will be kept private.

A second freedom of information and privacy act introduced in 1993 applies to universities, school boards, municipal governments and other local authorities. Neither that law nor the Health Information Protection Act, which came into force in 2003, has been reviewed, Dickson said in his report.

Dickson also discussed two recent cases — in Yorkton and Moose Jaw, respectively — in which medical records were found abandoned. The abandoned records included files of several hundred patients in Yorkton and several thousand patients in Moose Jaw from approximately a dozen physicians.

Investigations into the two separate incidents are ongoing, Dickson said, and the commissioner's office is working with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to find out how and why the records were abandoned. The investigation is also looking into who was the last responsible physician in charge of the files.

The two incidents led to similar concerns being raised in other communities, Dickson said.

"We then started receiving phone calls from many centres around the province," Dickson said. "People saying, 'Oh you're interested in abandoned health records? You want to come out and look at this building or this office or whatever.'"

Since the Yorkton and Moose Jaw complaints, the commissioner's office has identified a number of additional sources of abandoned records, Dickson said.