Privacy | Ottawa loses one passport per day

The federal government has lost one Canadian passport per day, on average, over the past year. This is the type of incident most commonly reported to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, according to an access to information request from The Press.

Employment and Social Development Canada reports having lost no less than 281 passports over a period of 260 days, from December 4, 2023 to August 20, 2024. This represents 1.1 passports lost on average each day during the period covered by our access request to information.

These figures make René Villemure, spokesperson for the Bloc Québécois on privacy matters, jump: “The Ministry should not lose any passports,” he said. Just one lost passport is one too many. » Passports are sent by registered mail from Canada Post.

“The majority of passport security breaches relate to passports misdirected in the mail, which are opened by the wrong recipient,” explains Samuelle Carbonneau, of the media relations department of Employment and Social Development Canada, who is responsible for the passport program.

A valuable document

The situation surprises the elected representative of the Bloc to the extent that Ottawa reminds Canadians that the “Canadian passport is a precious document” and recommends “always [le] keep it in a safe place”, never leaving it “unsupervised”.

Just under 4.5 million passports were issued in 2023-2024, according to Ottawa. “The error rate is less than 0.01%,” writes Samuelle Carbonneau.

A review by the Privacy Commissioner in 2021 found that 1,055 passports had been lost in four years (2016 to 2019) by four federal agencies. This is a rate of 0.7 passports per day. Our data shows that the situation has worsened with only one agency losing more than one per day.

Unhealthy curiosity at the Revenue Agency

Our access request also reveals that officials from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) accessed relatives' tax files 54 times without authorization.

In one case, dating from June 2024, a CRA employee accessed the file of a member of his spouse's family to consult his T4 form. The Privacy Commissioner's investigation reveals that the employee also accessed the file of the company where his spouse works. He viewed information on the 145 employees of this company as well as their spouses.

“It’s a problem that has existed for a long time,” recalls René Villemure.

“But your figures show us that things are not improving,” adds the MP, who wonders if sanctions are applied for these attacks on private life.

Graduation of sanctions

“Instances of unauthorized access to taxpayer information or similar information result in disciplinary action ranging from a 10-day suspension up to dismissal,” Nina Ioussoupova, media relations at the company, explains via email. 'BOW.

During the last year, for example, a civil servant who had unauthorized access to his own tax information received a 20-day suspension.

In another case, an official who accessed another taxpayer's file without reason was fired.

Every invasion of privacy is serious, recalls René Villemure. Stolen passports can enable identity theft. “Privacy is a fundamental element of our freedom. »

The request for access to The Press lists 479 privacy breaches in federal government agencies during the mentioned period. Thirty agencies reported breaches that could take four different forms: loss, theft, unauthorized access and unauthorized disclosure of personal data.

The Commissioner received 561 reports during the 2023-2024 year, according to his most recent annual report. This is an 88% increase from the previous year.

With William Leclerc, The Press