The Privacy Commissioner has ruled on licence plate tracking, but our police and government seem unwilling to obey the law. Who will hold them to account? (Originally published in Focus, January 2012.) Upon its release in November, the BC Privacy Commissioner’s report on the Victoria Police Department’s use of automatic licence plate recognition surveillance (ALPR)
An elderly woman, with the support of her family, has been struggling to avoid forced psychiatric treatment at the hands of Vancouver Island Health Authority doctors. When I arrived at the prearranged location, Michelle met me at the door. “Sorry, I didn’t want to tell you on the phone,” she said. “Now we’re going to go
At the same time as their associations channel public resources into private political lobbying, they claim immunity from BC’s laws governing public access to their records. They’re the two most prominent and influential policing organizations in British Columbia, appearing frequently in public promoting their strong positions on criminal justice reform, use of tasers, drug laws, or
The City of Vancouver’s emergency-management department has been ignoring the city’s policies governing closed-circuit-television surveillance since those policies were created in 2005. This became clear last May after the Georgia Straight reviewed the city’s “City of Vancouver REM CCTV Policy” and submitted freedom-of-information (FOI) requests for documents wherever the policy mandated record-keeping. Subsequently, the Straight
Our seniors care system is operating with a severe lack of standards. So what happens when the BC Ministry of Health gets into the cross hairs of a former Canadian Forces court martials judge? Read this article in Focus.