Shaun Newman Podcast - #667 - Tim Kasprick

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Former privacy and access consultant with Saskatchewan Health Authority, Buffalo candidate for Yorkton and farmer. We discuss all things freedom of information. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener. Ticket for Dr. James Lindsay “Parental Rights Tour”: https://brushfire.com/anv

This is Tom Bodrovix. This is Alex Kraner. This is Sean Alexander. This is Taner Nadei. This is Tom Romago. This is Moka Bezergian. And you're listening to Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Tuesday. How's everybody doing today? All right, let's start with silver gold bull. I actually got a silver coin sitting in my hand. Brothers roundtables have been interesting. We've been, you know, talking about the NHL playoffs and, you know, and coins. And there's been some betting going on. You get the point.

Well, Silver Gold Bull, they're my favorite precious metals dealer. Part of the reason is they're in Alberta-started company. I got a lot of time for companies to start here in Western Canada. And Silver Gold Bull certainly fits that profile. They've been offering full suite of service to all you to help you buy, sell, and store your precious metals. And one of my favorite things about gold and silver is, you know, honestly, I feel a little better at night about it.

And they have an exclusive offer for all of you, the SMP listener, and that's smaller than one ounce silver coins, Holding fractional silver gives you real optionality in a worst case economic scenario. And when we got, I don't know, Russian ships sitting in Cuba and World War III sitting on the brink here, you can kind of go, well, I wonder where we're going. Maybe we never need it. Who knows? They say, this is silver gold, well, low premium offered only for the, they're offering low premium to all of you listeners.

It means it's a solid investment no matter what comes to pass, right? So fractional silver, if we ever get to that situation where you need to, you know, trade a little silver. Fractional silver is going to be great. And what they're saying is it's low premium, so it's a decent little investment for you. Anyways, you can find out more from the experts, not me, by texting or emailing Graham in the show notes. Don't let me be your guide through the old precious metals. That's what Silver Gold Bull is here for. So if you go down in the show notes, you can text or email Graham, find out more about that.

or just say, hey, it's pretty cool that you're supporting the SMP. Either way. Cal Rock, your trusted partner in surplus oil field equipment, leading supplier of new used and reconditioned oil field production equipment in Canada. But that's not all tank fabrication, new and refurbished fluid storage tanks, trucking, pump tracks, and demolition, calrock.com. C.A. Rect power products, man, you got to go for demo days.

You got to go over and see what they're doing. I believe it is Wednesdays. You can call. You can get a chance to do a demo on that StarCard. Farg, the electric motorcross bike, you know, I'm, I'm going to be honest. I'm not intimidated by much, but when it comes to, like, motorcross stuff, I'm like, I just feel like I'm going to hurt myself. Everybody always laughs at me when I say that. But regardless, if you haven't been to the west side of Lloyd and looked at their showroom, looked at some of the things they're

using there, they got there, you really need to do yourself a favor and stop in. They're open Monday through Saturday. And for further details, you can always visit them at rechtech powerproducts.com. ignite distribution out of Wainwright, Alberta. They can supply industrial safety, welding, automotive parts. Essentially, you know, when it comes to your business, they can make sure that you never run out of everything that takes. You want to have good people watching out for what, you know, supply chain disruptions.

And, you know, when it comes to on-site inventory management, you want good people. Shane Stafford, I'm laughing because I'm trying to spit out. Shane Stafford is. is one of the good ones, and you can give them a call 780842-3433. He's going to help make sure that your business keeps purring along. I brought it up yesterday. I'm going to bring it up again here in July.

You're going to notice that the podcast is going to slow down ever so slightly. It's funny in my mind, you know, once upon a time I was doing an episode a week. And then you go to two, and then you go to three, and then you go to four, and then you've got a five. and all of a sudden you're at, you know, Monday through Friday, we're just releasing episodes. And now in July we're going to be taking family vacation, wife is done teaching. And so we're taking off for family road trip

and heading down to see her family. And so one of the things, you know, that I've identified in the podcast, you know, from working full time, is that I need to kind of shut down the brain. just ever so slightly and try and recharge the batteries. I talked about it with Drew Weatherhead on his podcast. And so July, I'm trying to make a long story short,

is we're going to slow down. So Wednesdays, we're not going to have an episode come out. And in my mind, that's a huge deal. You know, I'm going from, you know, five episodes a week down to three. And you're going, well, Wednesday, what are you talking about? That's four. And the mashups on Friday, we're going to have get. host. So I'm going to be releasing things on Monday, Tuesday, Thursdays. It won't be anything on

on, won't be anything on Wednesdays. And then on Fridays we're going to have guest hosts on the on on the mashup with twos. So that's a huge change for the month of July just for July and then starting back at the beginning of August. It'll be full steam ahead. I'm going to be drying this out while well, you know, try and get some family time in and enjoy, you know, the company of, you know, not having to worry about stressing what's coming up next week. No worries. I'm still going to be releasing things. And if you're wanting to pay attention to some of our travels,

substack is probably where I'm going to talk about some of that. Certainly the podcast, you're going to hear about it as well. But if you haven't signed up for substack, go down to the show notes. Substack is there. Okay, that's, I mean, happy Tuesday, folks. That's what I got for you today. Let's get on to the tale of the tape. He's a former privacy and access consultant with Saskatchewan,

Health Authority. I'm talking about Tim Casperic. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Numa podcast. Today I'm joined by Tim Casperic. So sir, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Now, you come via a mutual

friend, Liz Merle, and we got talking about freedom of information requests. And somehow this lands in your realm. Before we get to maybe that topic, specifically. Maybe we could just start with a bit about yourself, Tim, and, you know, take it where you must. For sure. So I'm Tim Casperic and I previously had a career with the Saskatchewan Health Authority

in Privacy and Access. And part of that role was members of the public would send in their access requests to the Saskatchewan Health Authority. And I would try and get them records that are responsive to their request. So I did that for many, many years. And for some reason, during COVID, I decided to leave the Saskatchewan Health Authority. And one of the things I do now is I happily speak to any organization that would like to know more about the freedom of information process. Because once you hear about it, it's very simple to do. Most of the the times it's free. It's a one page form and you can get a lot of information. Well, let's talk about it then, the freedom of information. You know, certainly up until COVID,

I would say there was a whole bunch of people that it never dawned on them that this would be something they probably needed to do. But now as, you know, things are, I don't know, what's the word, folks, becoming stranger all the time. and, you know, the freedom of information is, you know, I follow a blacklocks reporter and the Canadian taxpayer federation. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of others that do freedom of information requests all the time. And then that becomes news, essentially, because they're breaking stories that have been kind of hidden

from the public. When you're looking or thinking about a freedom of information request, who can you do that on? Like, can you do that? Can I walk up to Tim and say, Tim, I would like to do one on you? Or does it have to fall under specific terms? So the legislation that we're going to talk about today is the Saskatchewan provincial legislation. So the Freedom of Information Protection of Privacy Act. And to make it really simple, if the Saskatchewan government runs it, you can make an access request to them. So whether it's the Saskatchewan Health Authority, whether it's Saskatchewan crop insurance,

if the government runs it, so this includes our crown agencies, you can make an access request to them. You're a guy that's, you know, you mentioned you worked on this for quite some time up until COVID. I think we can insinuate what you mean by leaving during COVID. when you look at COVID specifically, I don't mean to lead the guest, but I'm like, if you were wanting to do these up, where do you think they'd be best, you know, applied, you know, to pull out some of the, well,

information surrounding those times and questions people had. You're spot on with your question. I'm going to just jump in with a little bit of background for everyone listening. When you make a freedom of information request, if you're not happy with the response that you got, whether you thought they redacted the records too much, so sometimes you get these pages of blacked-out records, or you didn't get as many records as you were expecting. There's actually oversight over this process, and it's the Information and Privacy Commissioner,

and that office publishes their reports on reviews that they're doing. And the reason I give this little background is they just did one exactly related to COVID. I'm going to actually read out what was requested. Your timing is perfect, Sean, on this. It's absolutely perfect. So here's an example of a very recent recent. request that a member of the public put into the Saskatchewan Health Authority regarding COVID, they weren't happy with a few things.

One, the health authority took a very long time. They're supposed to complete these requests normally within 30 days. It took them several months to do this one, and they tried to redact a lot of the content. So the person contacted the commissioner's office and said, I'd like you to review this. When the commissioner's office does a review, they publish it on their website, anyone can read the report,

and I want to emphasize this point, the commissioner includes verbatim what records you were requesting. So the whole world gets to see what records you were requesting and what kind of response you got, and there was a very recent report that I'm going to read,

read what the person was requesting. This is what they requested, as noted in the Commissioner's report. I'm requesting all emails, memos, guides, discussion papers, and briefing notes from Dr. Susan Shaw, Dr. John Froe, and Dr. Philip Farrie regarding the Saskatchewan Health Authority's COVID-19 patient triage preparations, plans and procedures and protocols. protocols for the time frame of September 1st, 2021 to October 20th, 2021. So I read that as an example of there's a lot that you can request. If you were, so I should actually pause there.

Do, was I explained that well as far as for what that person was requesting? I think so. Yeah, I, I was just thinking in my head, as you were saying, I'm like, oh, make sure the details matter, right? Because you're requesting, and if it's not in your request, first and foremost, they ain't going to give it to you, I assume.

And two, so being specific, but also being not too specific, right? The different briefing notes, I forget all the terms you used, but it wasn't just emails. There was a whole list of things that they were looking for. So I'll give some handy,

tips when making an access request. And I'm just, it probably won't show up too well on screen. But just for an example, this one page form is all it takes to make an access request. The first portion is simply your contact information. The second part is some checkboxes that they're not too crucial, but I'll mention. it says about the type of records you're requesting. It can be your personal information, the personal information about someone else

you're authorized to access, for example, your child's, or general information. And then here's the part that's going to be what we're talking about. This little box, and you can add a page to it in a Word document if you're asking for several things that don't fit in the box. this is where you fill in the records you wish to access.

So when we're looking at this one that was on the commissioner's site, you can request communication records. Is that the one, Tim, that you're talking about? And this is the form that gets submitted to the commissioner when you'd like them to review a response that you've received. And it has the different categories on it, such as you didn't receive all the records or part of the records weren't disclosed to you. The fees were too high or they took too long to respond to.

Those checkboxes at the bottom are the ones you can use. And the most common one is you've been denied access to part of the record. So for example, if you got, I'm just going to make an example, you got 100 pages, but 95 of them were all blacked out, then you appeal to the commissioner to say, say, could you review this? I don't think they should have blacked out that much of my request. That's the most common one that is requested for review. And on this form where you request the records, I have some tips for people, and you've actually noted some of those tips. You want to be as specific as you can, but don't let that deter you because government organizations

are really big. So if you think of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, there's 40,000 plus employees of who has what, where. If you know someone's name, and in this particular request I read out earlier, they did know some names, but you can also cite simply positions.

You might ask for a manager's records, or you can be more general, and you can simply ask for records on a particular topic, and you can expect that the organization will contact you to discuss your request, and each organization has what's called a duty to assist. That means they have to help the public find the records they're looking for, because I don't know which manager has what record specifically. I know the organization has a record, but exactly where?

you don't have to know that. You just need to know your topic. You need to know your time frame. So you may ask for records that span one year. You may ask for records that span one month. Depends on your topic. But the organization is supposed to assist you. It's also when you submit this form,

if you didn't do it perfect, it's all over. There's no hope. Not at all. as long as you were specific on your topic. And when I say specific to the extent that they understand what type of records you're looking for, does that help give you an idea as to what type of record you could request?

Yeah, I believe so, Tim. I, you know, I think I always knew that you could do something like this. I just never, well, and I just don't think I really ever thought there was a reason to do it from where I was, you know, until, you know, once again, COVID comes along and you're like, man, that really flipped the world on its head. Now I see, you know, now I bring back up Blacklocks reporter and, and Taxpayers, Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And to me, I see how slippery the government can be if you don't hold them to it. account. So when I bring it all the way back to COVID, man, maybe I'll just, maybe even if I go, I don't know how much you can actually talk about it, but regardless, you're a guy who dealt with this all the time. What were you seeing people,

you know, before COVID? If you take COVID out of it, what were people requesting information on? Like, you know, like, I assume a lot of it had to do with the money. And I don't know how, if you're, if you can talk to what you saw come through. Well, I can, speak generally to that. So you brought one of my favorite topics. Money. So before COVID, the Privacy Commissioner of Saskatchewan was very active in giving information session. So anyone in the public could attend. And the Saskatchewan Health Authority would attend because you want to do the best process, the best job to the public. Because there's an expression in the freedom of information world, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

What that means is, is straight to the point that you made earlier, if the public knows they can get records, if they can see what's going on, if they can ask questions when something seems really odd, then that reduces the chances. of fraud and abuse of our public systems. And I'm going to give you a hypothetical example. A common thing that's requested is contracts that involve money. And here's my hypothetical example that's going to talk about the sunshine effect. Let's say a particular facility normally paid $20,000 a year for their snow removal budget.

They contracted a firm, and that firm would come clear their parking lot every year. $20,000 contract. And then one year, there's a new contractor there, and now they're being paid $200,000 for that very same parking lot. By some coincidence, the manager who oversees all this now takes their vacation in Hawaii rather than just a short little three or four day vacation someplace. So I say that as a bit of a joke because when you see big or suspicious dollar amounts going somewhere, that does raise questions.

So in my hypothetical example, this new snow contractor who's getting $200,000 for a job that used to only cost $20,000, Shouldn't we find out about that change? Sounds pretty fishy. And there have been scandals in every province found out through freedom of information requests about suspicious activity. And what the hope is, and I think it does help, is that when organizations are educated about their responsibility under freedom of information, and maybe someone's thinking about giving a friend's company this big juicy snow removal contract because no, no, ever find out. And I'm sure he'll send me some tickets to Hawaii to show his appreciation.

Oh, but oh yeah, there's this freedom of information thing. They'll find out. They'll see my emails approving this. They'll know it was me. and I don't think I'll wind up going to Hawaii very often after all this is investigated. If I go back to COVID and now that you're no longer in that position, if you look at COVID and you go, people should probably be doing a freedom of information request on X.

Is there anything that sticks out in your mind or has it already been done? On the commissioner's website, he posts his past reports. So someone's made a request. They weren't happy with the records they received or lack of records. There's been many such reports posted to the commissioner's office. They range from some of the public health orders to the one I just read out, some of the decisions being made by the leading physicians of the health authority. And if you start digging deeper into things and you want to know what type of expenditures

were being done, how waiting lists grew. So if you wanted a particular surgery and the waiting list kept growing, if your hospital was on bypass, how many days was it on bypass for? how many hospitals across the province were on bypassed during this period of time? There are so many topics that I would say my best suggestion is think of your local community, think of your local hospital, think of something that you've been concerned about. It could be a facility closing. It could be about wait times.

and if you put in an access request that covers the time period that we'll say COVID was at its peak, you might be surprised by what you find out. I've been curious about, well, statistics in general, because, you know, I follow a bunch of different men who, and just, we were just a week ago at an injection of truth town hall in Calgary, Laudette. And they got talking over and over again about how this, statistics and take whatever website you want, folks, government website, I mean, where the statistics started to be altered or just removed entirely. Is there a way to recover, I don't know,

I guess I'm just going to say statistics. I don't know how better to ask that. That's probably a little too general, but you get the general idea. That's a very good question. And I believe I have some good news for you. So when a government organization posts information to their website, that's very good. But then one day you can go there and, hmm, that information isn't to there anymore. That link on the website's gone. You can still find out. Government organizations have to follow record retention policies.

Depending upon that record, a particular record has to be kept for many years, sometimes well beyond many years. So even though it's not on their website, they still have the record. Does it bother the Arrived can app? I don't know if you'd saw and forgive me folks. One of their, was it employees or was it third party? Regardless, he had to testify.

And when he changed out the battery in his computer, all the files just disappeared. Now, what he said to them was, well, they're not gone, but what then the questioner asked back, well, isn't a little convenient that now we have to go find all your emails through everybody you emailed instead of just the central location. Is there ways that they could get, you know, like while, if you do a request on them,

is there ways or things that are concerning you that you've been watching going, oh, they're trying to be clever here on trying to. to get rid of some of the information or you're like, they can try, but that's not going to happen. Saskatchewan unfortunately recently made the Globe and Mail in a bad way. As far as for having the records, organizations have to have records to do their business. So if you make records disappear or go away,

that's pretty high risk. but there has been something specific under access that the Global Mail uncovered. They themselves made a request in Saskatchewan. They had the Privacy Commissioner to review it. And that is government compliance with the Privacy Commissioner's recommendations. So when he does a report,

and I'll give an example, let's say you requested 100 pages and again, 95 were blacked out. They can only black them out if there's an authorized reason under the legislation to exempt them from being disclosed. So for example, an employee's home phone number,

that wouldn't be released, but we would release their work phone number. But we wouldn't release their home phone number. So that's something we should black out. But when it comes to the content that they were making of the record and talking about the organization, you thought you should have got more than the five pages out of the 100

goes to review, and the commissioner reviews it, and he says, yes. Out of those 100 pages, only 25 of those should have been redacted. The other 75 should be given to you, unredacted. He writes a report, posts on his website. Wouldn't your expectation be you're going to get these 75 pages? Of course, it's the Privacy Commissioner. They reviewed it. They issued the report.

In Saskatchewan, the Privacy Commissioner can only make recommendations. They don't have order-making power. In contrast, Alberta's Commissioner does have order-making power. If they issue a report and you're supposed to get those 75 pages, you get the 75 pages. you get the 75 pages. It's an order. But in Saskatchewan, the government organization can choose

to disregard the Privacy Commissioner's recommendations. Is that... It's a joke, doesn't it? It does. We're doing this commie skit now. We have the... Well, it fits with the times we live in

to have a privacy commissioner, or not be able to do anything, right? Well, we see that we haven't really given what they asked for. And you're saying we should, but we're not going to. So is that a Saskatchewan thing, or is that more provinces than I give, you know, or is there more provinces that are like that? Like, are they unique or are they one of the same? You mentioned Alberta's different, but how about everybody else?

So it's a mix. Some provinces have order-making power and some don't. And I want to give credit to our commissioner for years, because this legislation can be updated. It's not set in stone. He's advocated that his office needs order-making power because now there's been a, and this is going to be my own spin on things.

We're going to tie it into COVID. Right now, Saskatchewan is one of the worst provinces in Canada for government organizations complying with commissioner recommendations. One of the worst. So what I think COVID has done, it wasn't perfect before COVID, but what COVID seemed to do, if we think of all the emergency things and mandates that came along, we have the superpowers now, us organizations, we can just issue decrees and that'll be what we do.

The rate of compliance, I don't have the statistics, but I feel it's gotten even worse because this sense of we don't have to answer to anybody really got exposed during COVID. And now with the commissioners that reports, all the organizations follow the commissioner reports.

They see how other organizations are getting away without following the recommendations. And isn't it human nature to say, hey, if they can get away with it, I think I can't end too. So they're obliged to cooperate with the commissioner during an investigation, but the all-important ending point, here's the recommendations. Will you do it, government organization? And sometimes the commission will issue several recommendations,

And in that example I use, he may say you only got five pages initially. I think you should get 75 pages. And the government organization says, we're going to stick to our original decision of the five pages. And we'll give Sean not one page more. You said, and I'm going to try and you got to, I want to make sense of the sentence you said, because something obviously didn't sit right.

You said Saskatchewan is the most compliant or one of the most compliant, not. They're not one of the most compliant. That's right. They're one of the worst for compliance with the commissioners. With the commissioner. So commissioner says, hey, you should give out X. And they go, thank you for that, but we don't have to do Jack Squat. And they carry on with life.

Correct. Correct. When it comes to, I'm going to pick on the police for a second, the RCMP operating in Saskatchewan, is that under Saskatchewan, provincial legislation or is that federal? The RCMP are federal, but things like city police, that does fall under provincial. So there is instances, though, where you look at things and you go, well, you might have to file a federal one because that's, you know, like it's this jurisdiction thing, right? Like who, where are you sending it, making sure the proper eyes or dotted T's crossed and

get sent to the right person because otherwise you could be chasing your tail an awful lot. You know, when I think of some of the things I've been curious about, you know, because it's just not handy. Can you do freedom or would you? I don't know the answer. Freedom of information on like death statistics or vital statistics. I don't know if that's public knowledge, right, where you could just look in, can you look in, like, I don't understand how they record it. But like if I take Lloyd Minster, come right to where I live, there's got to be something being tracked relative on how many people are being born. But there also should be a flip side on how many people are dying, correct? Correct.

And you should be able to then do a freedom of information on that? Yes. Who would you, do you send that off to Saskatchewan and Alberta governments? Correct. So let's walk through that example. and you're asking perfect questions because for someone making an access request, you think, okay, I want to know a piece of information,

but boy, who do I even ask? I'll give you good news on this. This is going to be a good news story. So let's say you thought, well, I'm going to ask the Ministry of Health, Saskatchewan's Ministry of Health for this data. you don't have to worry which manager has that record. You simply send it to the Ministry of Health.

You fill out the form. You've got your contact information. You've put in that little paragraph what records you'd like. The onus is on them to find those records and to communicate with you if they need any clarification. So you've basically done 100% of what you need to do. 10 minutes. If they decide that the Saskatchewan Health Authority actually has those records, they'll inform you that they're transferring that request to the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and from their own end, the Saskatchewan Health Authority will communicate with you on your

request. So in other words, it's a pretty easy thing to do is what you're trying, I think you're trying to get across to me here. If you have 10 minutes, you're in business with the information request. Free, no lawyers involved. It's, it's just one of those things you, until you hear about it, you just simply don't know that it exists, but it's, it's no 10-page form with, I know it's quick and easy. It's one of the simplest forms you'll fill out. Let me ask another specific question.

You know, sitting here having a show with my name on it and then talking the way I talked or bringing the people on that I continue to bring on, it was Daniel. Bullford, obviously one of the men from the Freedom Convoy who told me about doing one on himself and the things that he, he, you know, learned through that process. If a person was to request information about oneself, is there any way they can withhold information about you? You're just asking all my favorite questions. under the freedom of information,

and it was one of those checkboxes I just briefly mentioned earlier that's on the form. And it's under the information about the records you're requesting, and the first checkboxes are you requesting your own personal information. So we're not worried about the snow removal contract. You want records about you, that have your name on it that a government institution has. Under the legislation, you have a very powerful right of access to a record that has your name on it. So, for example, I could submit a request asking for records about you.

I'll probably get a lot of it blacked out. Some I might get. but if you made that request, those exemptions, many of them no longer apply because it's you asking about you. There's specific sections in the legislation that enhance and empower a person to ask for their own personal information. And personal information, I'll give a very simple description.

It has your name on it. Or it's attached to your name in some fashion. in essence, you are the owner of that information that the government has. They simply get to use it for an authorized purpose and keep it safe. But the actual content, the information, it's you, Sean, who's the owner. Well, I wonder at times what has been said. And I'm sure others do too, right? you show up to the joke, you know, they're always listening or, you know, you show up to

a protest and you wonder what gets talked about. And I always joke, I mean, like, if people just tune in on the podcast, I mean, they probably got me, I don't really hold anything back on here. So I'm like, at the end of the day, I'm incriminating myself every time I hop on here. But it, it would be curious to go back into the dark days of COVID and see what was being said back then. And what you're, I think saying is if I do one on myself, they can't black any of it out because it's all me. Correct. There would be very limited exemptions. And I'll give an example.

If they ask their lawyer for legal advice about this Sean Newman guy, there would be an exemption that they wouldn't have to tell you what the lawyer said about you. However. But you would see the question they have. Yep. You would still get to see that there is communication. You'd also get to see a lot of information that happened, we'll say, between employees and an organization, because if they're talking about you, it's very difficult for them to exempt that. A couple of things when I step away for more of like what has been going on in the world, Tim, is one has been going to, um, going to, down south of the border. Now, I assume it operates similar, but a little different. But one of the things about, you know,

you hear about whether it's the Clintons or if you go through COVID and you bring in Fauci, is when they use their personal emails, you can't get access to that. I assume when you bring it up north here, if they were using personal XYZ to talk about us, I assume you can't have access to that. Am I right in that thinking? Do you see how big I'm smiling?

Yes. No, they're in trouble if they do that and they'd have to produce those records. So you're telling me if they, how would that work? How would they know? Yeah. I'm going to paraphrase a commissioner's report on that exact topic. Several years ago, a rural municipality, they got an access request, The person wasn't happy with the response asked the commissioner to review.

It turned out some of the staff and counselors at that local municipality, at the rural municipality, were using, I believe it was Gmail addresses to do some of their work. And so they said, we're not going to give you these records because I use my Gmail for that. commissioner investigated and said hand over the records because you were doing government business on your private account instead of the account you should have been using you made that choice so that would be personal phone numbers too then right because if they have a personal cell phone and they're talking government business on there that would extend to that. Am I right in that thought process as well? Yes, because this all got to be, it's one of those

topics that has really, I would say, become a much bigger issue over the last 10, 15 years. Well, certainly, because of the cell phone, right? Everything goes to your cell phone now. So when I, when I used to work for a corporation, when I was working in the oil field, I had, you had your work phone and you had your personal phone. And lots of times, you just bleed it into one and you just have the work phone. But you would run two phones because, you know, I'm going to do. I'm going to have it. And that wouldn't have been a thing 10 years before me, 20 years before me, for sure, because you just wouldn't have had that option. So this is an ever evolving situation that's going on right now. So I'll add some context to this. I don't think there's any privacy

commissioner in Canada in any of the provinces that would be happy to hear that a government officials using their hotmail or their Yahoo address or whatever it is to do their official government job. And there's many reasons for that. And I'll give some of the most important. Not only is it they're supposed to be using your government one, but let's talk about the reasons why that should be. How secure is somebody's Yahoo email address versus the government one?

So there is a security risk, never mind what they said about you, but they're obliged to keep that record private, secure, confidential. And if you're out Yahooing around on your Yahoo account, you have flunked the security test. So government officials are supposed to use the devices and accounts provided to them by their organization, not just because of FOI requests, but because of the security and integrity of those records.

And I'll give another example. I've got a corny SHA CEO joke coming to mind that made the news a couple years ago, but I'll spare your audience. But hint, hint to those out there who know what I'm talking about, If I was still working for the government and I just decided, you know what, I'm not coming into work Monday, I quit. No notice, nothing, just I'm done.

Bahamas, here I come. I'm, and I, whoosh, I ghost them. And I had all my records on my Yahoo account. Now, whoever's supposed to follow me, how do they get those records? I could drop dead tomorrow, too. So that's another reason why employees are to use their authorized accounts. So that way if I didn't show up or whatever happened to me, they'd have the IT ability to transfer my records, my emails to who's ever going to fill in for me or the new hire.

They can't do that on my Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or whatever it is I'm using. one other random question, because I literally was just having this chat two nights ago, that there are now becoming AI programs that can go in and wipe out incriminating evidence. Now, on one hand, I guess the one question is, is that possible? I'm going to say yes. Be curious your thoughts. Two, is there people bold enough in government? once again, I'm probably going to say yes, that would enlist that technology to help cover up maybe some of the things they said or did during, once again, COVID seems to be the big

elephant in the room of the last five years. But I've heard we got talking about that because we got talking about these freedom of information requests specifically. And the comment was made while they got this new technology coming out that can wipe the records, can wipe the, and I went, man, really? What are your thoughts on that, Tim? I'm going to make a little bit of a comparison to a statistic that's got some years behind it. In addition to investigating freedom of information concerns the Privacy Commissioner of Saskatchewan

also investigates privacy breaches. So totally separate than an access request. But Saskatchewan, like every province, has a very well-formed electronic health record. So if you've had any x-ray, any lab work, any medication, just about any medical service you can think of, that record is now electronic. And if you work for the healthcare system,

most times your name is searchable in those databases, they can find you, which is nice. If you come into the emergency room, they can find your whole history, give you the right treatment. That was one of the reasons to do this. But they can also snoop on you. Hey, I wonder if you ever took that COVID vaccine. I'm just going to go in here and have a look.

Can't do that. That's snooping. And systems are audited. People can request the list of who's viewed them. So, for example, you can put in a request to e-health, Saskatchewan to say, please give me the list of names who's viewed my medical profile this year. And if you see names that have not provided service to you, you can get the commissioner, and you can get the SHA as well to investigate that.

But to your point about the wiping out of data, and this was the point I wanted to get to, there's a statistic in the snooping of health records. And here it is. When employees become aware that their viewings are being audited rigorously. So if I really want to look up Sean, but I know I'd get fired if I did that because they'd catch me, I guess I won't do that. Good auditing has been noted to eliminate 95% of snooping. But what about that last five?

There have been some situations and Saskatchewans had them, give the classic example. When there's a love triangle on the go and someone can find out juicy stuff, it's right literally underneath my fingertips. Yeah, they audit me. Yeah, I could get caught. But I do it anyways. That's that 5% that will commit a privacy breach, even if they've been. believe there's a significant chance they'll get caught and punished for doing so. They'll take the risk, they'll take the punishment as long as they get to see what they want to see.

So back to what you said, how far would somebody go to, shall we say, erase their tracks? My guess is 95% wouldn't because if you think of all the erasing you'd have to do and how decisions have already been made. And now there's this hole in the records that seems to match your position. We got everybody else's records. But hey, Tim, where are yours? They seem to all be gone. And then you'd have to actually have some connection

that you could have the technical ability to get to basically hack your own, organization with this AI program you have access to to get in to a network level that you don't have and do it? I wouldn't say it's impossible. But that would be very high risk, although I'm sure there's 5% out there who would do it. I got a couple more before I let you out of here. One that popped to mind was for anyone who went to the Freedom Convoy was in Ottawa. If they were to do a freedom of information request, A, they don't have to be in Ontario to do it, right?

I assume you can do one of these from any province to another province. You don't have to be a live. Right. Right. Okay. And then two, if you were concerned about it, if it's the city of Ottawa police, then you would have to do a specific, like this isn't cut and paste, the Freedom of Information Act.

you'd have to go find the specific one to then request information from that specific organization, correct? Cool. And then when it comes to, like, go to the highest levels of intelligence, like, CESIS, you can do one on them as well on yourself? So CESIS would be federal. I haven't gone into making federal access requests. So I'm just going to give you just my very rough thoughts. I believe you can.

I would expect they would have a lot of exemptions that they could use. But I think you can do that. You just think, you know, probably the largest protest heard around the world in the last hundred years you know and i and i give my hats off to some of the protests going on in uh in europe and everywhere else but i mean that one right there really shook the foundation of of this country at least and you go i wonder what what was being said about some people during those times and i'm i don't think i'm anything special i just i think i even tamara leach or chris barber you know

some of the names that uh are there but then you do kind of want to I wonder what was being said back then. I don't know how many, you've been, to me, very thorough or, you know, like answered, is there anything we've skipped over, Tim, that you're like, people should know this? There's a few statistics I think people would be interested in. Now, I've talked about some of the challenges in getting records, but very often you will get records. It's not every time everything gets blacked out.

You can make a request and you can get the full record unredacted. There's a few fees that can apply, but just as a general rule, depending upon the organization you're applying to, it's free to make the application. Some have a $20 application fee, and they'll inform you if that's what they need. And you can usually get 100 pages or more, for free.

So if you're thinking about just what could I request and but if you start asking for 10,000 pages and things like that then you can run into fees but I think a lot of people would be very happy to make a request and get 100 pages for free

and get to see a lot of information and to ask for records on themselves very difficult to sever those out and I think we're going to advance right to the top learners portion. It doesn't all end at the commissioner's office if you don't want it to. You can go to the court of King's bench if you've been denied access after the commissioners completed his review,

and within 30 days of that review, the government will say if they will follow those recommendations and give you the records, or if they won't. There's only been a handful of cases that have gone to court. The commissioner actually has a guide on templates on how to do it. The commissioner has excellent resources on all these topics, but you can self-represent in court of King's Bench not really say very much because the onus is on the government organization

to defend the exemptions they applied to a judge. And if the judge says, no, that exemption doesn't apply, and the judge rules in your favor, you are now getting the records, whether they like it or not. And I think this option is going to be used more in Saskatchewan because of the declining rate of compliance,

with the commissioner's office. And as I gaze into the future, if enough of these cases go to court and they win, the freedom of information world is a very connected world. They follow these court cases. And if they see more people are going to court and they're winning,

they're self-representing and they're beating the government organization because they applied, but they misapplied exemptions that they shouldn't, then I think it could really shake things up in Saskatchewan for more compliance and more transparency, because really this is what it's supposed to be about, this legislation is for transparency.

We spend billions of dollars, you've got records on everybody. Of course you need transparency to make all that work. And COVID shot us in the other direction. reflection, less transparency, less access. And we need to turn that around. I completely agree. Appreciate you coming on and doing this. I think it, you know, like a beginner's class in freedom of information. If there is questions that come up, because I'm sure they're will, people can always fire me a text and I can probably put them in contact with you, Tim, because you seem like you're going to be.

a wealth and knowledge when it comes to making sure it gets filled out right with the, you know, and to the right people. And who knows? Maybe there's, maybe there's things people have been really wrestling with and trying to get to the bottom of. And maybe there's a way to get that out of a government agency because it seems like, you know, on one plan, the government is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So that sucks. On the other hand, the government is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, which means you can pull information from pretty much every facet of life right now if you just get it to the right people. And they have no, no option but to comply. I mean, Saskatchewans, that oddity, as you pointed out. But I appreciate you coming

on and doing this. This has been, well, an enjoyable hour, a thought-provoking. I got to think on some of this on, you know, does Sean Newman do a foyer on himself, you know? That would be interesting to me, I guess. I would fully endorse that idea. Well, thank you, sir, for coming on. Thanks again, Tim. And, well, we'll chat soon. For sure. And if any of your viewers contact you and they'd like some help from me, I'd be happy to do so. Perfect.