OTTAWA — The Conservatives want the federal privacy commissioner to investigate “disturbing” potential privacy breaches that revealed the personal information of dozens of Canada Revenue Agency whistleblowers in public court documents.
“It is very disturbing, that they would so carelessly make all that information public. It really does undermine the concept of protecting whistleblowers and allowing them to come forward,” Conservative MP James Bezan said in an interview Monday.
Last week, Bezan sent a letter to the privacy commissioner requesting he investigate how the private information of dozens of Canada Revenue Agency employees who have made allegations against their employer found their way into publicly available documents as part of unrelated legal proceedings at the federal court.
The documents were from Public Sector Integrity Commissioner (PSIC), who is the ethics watchdog and investigator for the federal public servants, and were included as part of the CRA’s response to a lawsuit from two employees who are asking the federal court to force the PSIC to investigate their claims of harassment from their former superior.
But buried within over 2,000 pages of documents from PSIC and CRA is a trove of information about unrelated whistleblowers who also worked at CRA, including their names, contact information and even details about their complaints and who they targeted.
In his letter, Bezan says he is concerned that potential...
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