It’s a pain, but Jennifer Stoddart is quite happy to put a password on her BlackBerry. Of course, she’s the same person who keeps a shredder in her bedroom. And retailers beware: Forget asking Stoddart for her phone number at the cash register. “Giving out my home phone number in order to buy a tube of lipstick, I’ll push back because this all goes into making your marketing profile, which is often based on telephone numbers. It’s not a legal requirement to give your telephone number to purchase anything.”
Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart
Stoddart has good reason to be leery. As the federal privacy commissioner, she is constantly exposed to scams and data breaches. In 2005, in fact, she became the “unwanted main character” in a Maclean’s magazine story about Canadians’ vulnerability to leaks of their cellphone records. After paying a U.S. data broker $200, the magazine got detailed lists of her calls and then handed them to her. The case was a good lesson in how even Canada’s privacy watchdog wasn’t safe from scammers seeking profit by sharing personal information.
Since taking on the job in 2003, Stoddart has championed Canadians’ privacy rights. From speaking out recently against the Conservative government’s plans to let police listen in on people’s Internet-based conversations to taking on retailer TJX Companies Inc. over the leaking of customer credit card data to hackers in 2007, she has made it clear governments and businesses need to do more to guard against intrusions. “Unfortunately, there’s a growing big bad world of cyber-thieves out there,” she says. “There’s a whole black market in stolen credit cards, stolen SIN numbers, full addresses.”
Defending rights, in fact, has been a focus for Stoddart since she finished law school at McGill University in 1980. Her career has spanned the federal and Quebec public services, including her first job out of law school working for the now-defunct Advisory Council on the Status of Women. She then went on to work for both the Canadian and Quebec human rights commissions before becoming president of the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec. “I guess when it’s all said and done, one of the important things about life is what you’ve contributed, what you’ve done for your society, what you’ve added to it in a positive way,” she says. “I’d say social justice obviously, but more than that issues of fairness and equity in society, [and] issues of appropriate public policy, whether it be hands on or hands off.”
The daughter of a lawyer, Stoddart says her choice to pass up private practice for public service has been a good fit. “There are really important issues, and I just find it personally more fulfilling to work in government on public policy issues than I would working for one client. I always have problems seeing only one side of an issue so I’m happiest in issues where there is a kind of adjudicative value [and] there is an analysis because I find it’s very rare that one side is totally right, and the other side is totally wrong.”
The switch from human rights law to privacy issues was a natural one, she adds. “Certainly there’s a great similarity between human rights commissions [and privacy],” she says, noting privacy issues fell under federal human rights legislation until the government passed a separate law in 1982.
But since becoming privacy commissioner, a big focus has been resuscitating an office decimated by public controversy over her predecessor George Radwanski, whose spending habits were the subject of a fraud trial that ended with his acquittal this year. Radwanski left in disgrace in 2003. “It was very difficult, and there were at least four investigative bodies here when I took over,” says Stoddart. They were “reviewing everybody’s level of classification, which is basically your salary level in the public service. Nothing can be more threatening than somebody going along saying ‘I think you’re overpaid’ and then issuing recommendations to me. I think there were 20 classifications they suggested that I should downgrade. . . . I didn’t downgrade them all. That was my discretion. I had to defend it.”
Stoddart has turned the office around in concert with increases to her office’s budget from the government. As a result, staffing levels have doubled to about 160 people from 85 when she took over. “We have a whole new generation of young privacy lawyers,” she says, noting it’s only now that many new practitioners are getting specific training in privacy and access to information issues.
