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More than 10 years after the introduction of federal private sector privacy legislation in Canada, damage awards for breaches of the law have been few and far between -- and where such awards have been made, the dollar amounts awarded have been modest.

In light of the sometimes confusing, and even contradictory judgments to date, there is also considerable uncertainty as to when such damages might be awarded, and what evidentiary test a complainant might have to meet.

In Panning for gold in the mud: the availability of privacy damages under PIPEDA, in the December 2011 edition of the Canadian Privacy Law Review, David Elder of our Privacy and Data Protection Group, attempts to knit together the existing case law into a coherent analytic framework for the availability of privacy damages in Canada.

Article reproduced with permission of the publisher from Canadian Privacy Law Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, December 2011.

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Late last week, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) passed on a chance to shed some light on what it considers to be “reasonable” collection of personal information.  It dismissed the Alberta Information and Privacy Commission’s appeal of an Alberta Court of Appeal decision that found “reasonable” collection of personal information to not necessary mean an organization must employ the “best” or the “least intrusive” methods.

As we noted in an earlier post, the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the Commissioner’s ruling and stated that Leon’s Furniture Limited was justified in collecting driver’s licence and licence plate information from customers picking up furniture. Leon’s argued that the observance of such policy was for fraud prevention and deterrence purposes only and that it assisted police in any ensuing fraud investigations. The Commissioner claimed that Leon’s policy was a violation of Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA or Act), as collection of the disputed information was not “reasonable” under section 11 of the Act and it constituted a “condition of supplying a product or service” under section 7(2) of the Act. Both claims were rejected.

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