The Toronto Star, Canada
June 30, 2013 Sunday
Ann Cavoukian: privacy commissioner’s job `my life’s work’
For Ontario’s privacy commissioner, work is her greatest pride and her
commitment to freedom is a personal tribute to her Armenian forebears.
By:Jim CoyleNews, Published on Fri Jun 28 2013
It says something about Ann Cavoukian’s energy and work ethic that
when she was recovering from neurosurgery a few years back she added
to her onerous workload as Ontario’s information and privacy
commissioner the Sunday hobby of learning to paint.
It helped her “chill” a bit, she says. “I just started playing with
it.” Now, her work is sufficiently accomplished that one painting
fronts her Christmas cards each year and others adorn the walls of her
office.
Ann Cavoukian is a slight, vivacious force of nature. Now 60, she is
finishing up a third term as commissioner and, in about a year, will
leave the office in which she’s spent a quarter-century and which
she’s built into the best of its kind in the world.
Cavoukian – who speaks to the Pentagon and companies such as Google,
Adobe, Microsoft, Intel and IBM about information and privacy issues –
is justifiably proud of the work she’s done. But she has no intention
of retiring. Apparently, it isn’t in her family DNA. There will be a
new gig. Cavoukians work.
It probably says something, meanwhile, about Dalton McGuinty’s famous
lack of people skills that, when he appeared last week before an
Ontario legislature committee, he slighted Cavoukian in the very area
in which she takes the most pride.
For his troubles, the former premier must have felt as if he’d poked
his nose into a beehive.
Deleted emails
McGuinty was appearing for a second time before the committee
investigating his hugely expensive 2011 decision to relocate two gas
plants. His encore was required after the committee learned that
McGuinty’s senior political staffer had deleted virtually every email
or record related to the decision.
In April, Cavoukian had received a complaint from NDP MPP Peter Tabuns
that the former chief of staff to the former minister of energy in the
Liberal government had improperly deleted all emails related to the
cancellation of the plants in Mississauga and Oakville.
Cavoukian had no jurisdiction over the Ontario Archives and
Recordkeeping Act. But Tabuns made the logical point that the nub of
his complaint was about information – and there could be no access to
information if that information was not preserved.
So, “as a favour, as a service,” Cavoukian investigated.
And on June 5, she released a scathing report called “Deleting
Accountability: Records Management Practices of Political Staff.” She
said the act had been violated by more than one political staffer –
including the premier’s chief of staff – who deleted all emails
relating to the plants.
When she appeared before the committee last week, Cavoukian said “it
simply strained credulity that it could be for reasons other than
shielding one’s activities from public scrutiny.”
McGuinty followed her to the witness seat – and basically continued
the haplessness that marked his last 18 months in public office.
He said the legislation in question, which his own government passed
in 2006, was so Byzantine as to be unfathomable to mortal man. Then he
went a step too far.
“I have never heard from the information and privacy commissioner
about any dereliction of duty on the part of my office,” the former
premier sniffed.
In short order, Cavoukian was on CBC’s Power and Politics saying,
“please, this is not rocket science.”
There was not one email to be found regarding the gas plants from the
former chiefs of the staff to the former energy minister and former
premier, she said.
“Do you really think it’s acceptable to think you can delete
everything?” she asked. “By deleting everything, there’s absolutely no
opportunity for the public to scrutinize what you’ve done.”
What really got Cavoukian’s dander up, what was “astounding to me,”
was McGuinty’s suggestion that it was her job to brief his staff on
what they should or shouldn’t preserve and “that I have not fulfilled
my obligations.”
“To me, it hurt that he said, ‘Well, you know, she never spoke to us
about the Archives and Recordkeeping Act.’ Well, I didn’t do that
because I’m not supposed to. It’s not my job.”
Her job, she told the Star, she takes very seriously.
“We produce more reports here, more investigations, more
groundbreaking work than any other comparable office anywhere else in
the world. Just ask anyone.
“I often tell my team here, ‘So, what am I going to do for my second
shift tonight,’ which is after dinner? And they always give me a
package to take home. And I do it with great pleasure. I feel like
it’s my life’s work.”
In fact, Cavoukian considers it akin to the fulfilment of a family
legacy – the cherishing of freedom, and freedom’s twin bulwarks of
information and privacy.
“That’s their legacy to me: freedom.”
Started from scratch
Her Armenian grandfather escaped the genocide there in the early 1900s
and got his family out through his quick wits and skill as an artist.
(By way of thanks, he later restored the frescoes in a cathedral in
Jerusalem.)
The Cavoukians moved to Cairo, where there was a significant Armenian
community. There, her father became a celebrated portrait photographer
and Cavoukian and her two brothers (including the famed children’s
entertainer Raffi) were born.
She recalls being taken to the Pyramids most Sunday mornings as a
little girl, where there was a café at the base for adults and a
merry-go-round where the nannies took the children. “It was
beautiful.”
Life was apparently wonderful, at least until Gamal Abdel Nasser came
to power. Her father sensed trouble coming, not to mention the
conscription of his sons, and the family left “in the dead of the
night.”
“My mother always said, ‘We came here with eight suitcases, two
mothers (her mother and mother-in-law) and three children.’ So they
had to start from scratch.
“I just know that freedom was at the heart of everything they did, in
terms of why they brought us here. And that, to me, is their legacy to
me and that’s why this work is so important to me. This is what I do
for my parents, this is what I do for everyone. Freedom is so
essential.”
At the University of Toronto, Cavoukian earned a doctorate in
psychology and the law. She went to work at the attorney general’s
ministry and became head of research services. When Sidney Linden was
appointed Ontario’s first information and privacy commissioner in
1987, he hired Cavoukian – whom he had come to know through work on
the police services commission.
“I just jumped at it,” she said. There were only three people on staff
but the job offered the gratification of building something. Besides,
the world of computer technology – and the then-unimagined
implications for information and privacy – was just coming to life.
“We were very avant garde,” she says. “We all got PCs on our desks.
This was considered in 1988 to be a big deal.”
Cavoukian hadn’t anticipated staying at any job more than five years,
but “the beauty of this job is that it has changed every year.” She’s
dealt with everything from the security of medical information to
genetic testing, video surveillance to the biometric identification of
self-admitted problem gamblers at Ontario casinos.
“Thank God I’m married to an engineer,” she laughs.
In 1997, Cavoukian was appointed commissioner. And in the late ’90s
she developed her “Privacy by Design” concept to embed privacy into
the design of IT systems and processes. Now, it is the international
standard.
As she approaches her final year on the job, the deleted email affair
stands as the most difficult of her many investigations.
“This is the only one for which I’ve been called to testify before a
standing committee,” she says.
It’s worrisome to her that officers of the legislature – the
ombudsman, auditor-general, the information and privacy commissioner –
are increasingly being called to provide oversight in matters of
accountability and transparency, “ways that weren’t contemplated
perhaps before.”
“In a free and democratic society we rely on the public looking over
the shoulders of our government, making sure that we put them under
some kind of public scrutiny. By deleting emails, deleting records,
you are shielding yourself from public scrutiny . . . If we don’t have
that kind of ability, they can do whatever they want.”
Up on a shelf in her office, still, is a photograph of Cavoukian
standing with Dalton McGuinty. It’s inscribed, “To Ann, thank you.
Dalton.”
“It’s so sad,” she said. “It’s just such an unfortunate ending.”