Problematic Privacy Commissioner

Canada's Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien has been in the news lately mobilesyrup, Ottawa Citizen. He has been advocating for Canada to adopt a European-style "right to be forgotten"

Canada does not have a right to be forgotten. Commissioner Therrien understands this. He admits "Therrien has said there’s no explicit right to be forgotten in any Canadian legislation"

It's good that there is no right to be forgotten for many reasons. The main problem is that it is a "positive right". That is, it compels other parties to take some action or provide some resources to satisfy the "right" of an individual.

Rights, properly defined, belong to the individual. Someone might have the right to free speech, but that does not compel the government or established media to provide a printing press or an audience. A person might have the right to live where he chooses in a country, but that does not require the state to provide a moving truck or damage deposit to enable someone to move to a new city.

The right to be forgotten inverts this. It compels search engines to take an action to "forget" something that they know about. They are forced to agree to keep something secret. To take action to conceal something. To knowingly mislead those using the search service by concealing public information. This is especially corrosive because the issues are actually public record. Criminal convictions, bankruptcies, divorces, lawsuits against, professional censure. In living memory these things were published in the daily newspapers of record.

In the Europe court case it was a lawyer who wanted to keep a past bankruptcy secret. hmmm as a potential client I might want to know if a lawyer I was thinking of hiring had a history of being irresponsible about money and mismanaging money. Lawyers are often asked to hold clients money in trust. Anyway it is the responsibility of the consumer of the search result to evaluate the information returned and weigh different data points. To decide what is material and relevant and what is not. An individual may like to wish away black marks from the past but that is his problem, not the search engine.


The major issue with Daniel Therrien is that he is attempting to bypass Parliament and use lawfare to get a judge to create a right to be forgotten out of thin air. From the Citizen article.

The privacy commissioner wants the Federal Court of Canada to decide whether Canadians have the “right to be forgotten,” which would allow people to request that search engines remove old or embarrassing links about them.

Daniel Therrien is asking the court to decide whether Google falls under federal privacy laws when it displays search results about Canadians; if the court finds the search giant does, the company would have to remove some references when requested.

So that's wrong. Therrien concedes there is no right to be forgotten in legislation. Thus there is no such right. As privacy commissioner it's fine for Therrien to advocate for a right to be forgotten, or advise Parliament to enact such a right in legislation. It's not for the courts to decide. It's for the elected Parliament to establish rights.

Using the courts to bypass Parliament to advance his agenda is wrong and inappropriate to his office. Prime Minister Trudeau should fire Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien.