Your federal government says it believes in your right to privacy. They killed the long-form census — over a countrywide protest — because they felt that requiring you to answer certain questions was intrusive.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper also wants to kill the long-gun registry in part because of its cost, but also because he truly believes the government has no businesses prying into where these guns may be.
But Harper, his ministers and the bureaucrats who work for them in Veterans Affairs have blithely committed an ethical breach of privacy so severe it’s hard to believe government can be trusted in any way at all.
It would be so ironic for the Conservatives to fall over a failed vote on the gun registry, when really it should fall on a question of general confidence. We can no longer trust our government to respect anyone’s privacy while they go headhunting after their perceived enemies.
Having a government that considers its own people to be the enemy is bad enough. But having a bureaucracy violate its oath of non-partisanship and commit ethical breaches that would likely have anyone else immediately fired and subject to lawsuits — with impunity — is far worse.
Harper’s Conservatives were only recently elected when the staff in Veterans Affairs came to the new minister, Greg Thompson, with plans to overhaul the supports for military personnel who were injured on duty. This was a plan in the works for a long time, leading back to the era when the Liberal were in charge.
Among the people opposed to the New Veterans Charter was an injured soldier, Sean Bruyea. He had been a thorn in the side of Veterans Affairs when the government was still Liberal.
Bruyea had two main beefs: he didn’t believe the charter was a good idea and he was having a lot of trouble accessing services.
Clearly, he made some enemies in the department.
But that does not excuse the government nor its staff breaking its own laws to stifle and smear him.
Extremely sensitive medical records — including a doctor’s note about Bruyea having suicidal thoughts because of his difficulties getting services — were accessed and copied to hundreds of government workers, going as high up the food chain as Thompson himself. They were used in an effort to silence his opposition to the changes in the law.
So far as we know, from Bruyea’s courageous and extensive efforts to find out the truth — try filling out a Privacy Act application for information and paying for 14,000 pages of results — at no point did anyone stop and think: “Wait a minute, I shouldn’t be reading and discussing this.”
That’s what’s scary.
Veterans Affairs personnel — who took an oath on non-partisanship — were doing this both for their Liberal and Conservative political masters. And their ministers were apparently willing to let them.
The message is clear: don’t cross the government. If you do, they will dig into your private records for anything they can use against you. Screw your right to refuse a long-form census; if government doesn’t like you, you’re fair game.
Veterans ombudsman Pat Stogran (recently fired) complained bitterly in the summer about the bureaucrats who run Veterans Affairs.
Stogran said he was shocked to learn about what had happened to Bruyea.
He said the security officer at the department told him around the time of his appointment in 2007 that his own file had been accessed at least 400 times.
“I know anonymous emails and Facebook entries were made trying to defame my character. I’m wondering now what was going on,” he said.
So do we.
Greg Neiman is an editor with the Advocate.