Misconduct & "Privacy" in Canada

In the last couple of days there have been a couple of newspaper reports through the 'Postmedia' news service, of academic misconduct in Canadian universities.  Based on the details provided, it is challenging for the reader to know if these were two different stories, or if the details outline events related to one instance.

The challenges in sorting out the details appear to result from the notion that the details surrounding this case(es) are protected by Canadian privacy legislation; and as such, while the stories speak to misconduct in the information provided by the faculty member(s) to the funding agency, The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), most other details are absent from the reports.  The reading public is not provided with the name of the university(ies) involved, nor is the name of the faculty member(s) provided.

We are told in one of the stories that the faculty member resigned and has been hired by a different institution, but it is unclear as to whether the new setting is a university, whether the setting is in Canada, or whether the new employer has any awareness of the preceding misconduct........

So much information on this case is (to use the word made popular in the United States) redacted, it is virtually an empty story, save for the notion that perhaps most of us are not well served by either the Canadian privacy legislation, or the interpretation of such legislation when it comes to such matters.

What the heck is going on?  How is it that we have become so ensnared in issues around privacy (and in this case, it seems not just personal privacy), that misadventures and their consequences can take place in a vacuum of information.

It was NOT ever thus.  Because of my interest in family history, I have had occasion to review newspaper reports going back at least 200 years.  One of the most interesting revelations of such browsing is that newspaper reports in earlier times were often full of detailed personal information that many today might find surprising.  For example, it was not unusual for local newspapers to review the registers of local hotels and to report the arrivals and departures of registered guests.  It was also not unusual to have reported quite intimate details of family troubles.

In these current days of concern about matters such as identity theft, and with our world of immediate global communication, I am not suggesting that those earlier sensibilities would serve anyone well.  However, based on this recent reporting, one has to think that whatever the 'privacy wall' we have created in Canada, it appear that we have missed the mark in the other direction.

Are We Blind?

This morning I heard the news that Coca Cola Enterprises has announced plans to buy back $1Billion of its own stock.  Apparently this announcement is part of a larger pattern of corporations engaged in similar buy backs.  At least in part, the strategy reputedly is driven by an intent to help shareholders defer taxes.  But the practice also solves a 'problem' for the corporations, many of which are awash in cash reserves for which they have no immediate investment plans.  It is no secret that much of the world-wide corporate sector is sitting on such huge cash reserves.

The irony is, of course, that during this same period, unemployment rates across the globe, and particularly in some parts of Europe and the United States, are at or near record levels, with little prospect of a positive change any time soon.  And as importantly, many countries across the globe are in fiscal difficulty due to rising expenses and declining or stagnant tax revenue -- leading to large accumulated deficits.  Indeed, many governments are being told to institute deficit cutting programs, mostly focused on reducing spending on 'costly' programs such as health care, and apparently 'expensive', but unfunded, pension commitments.

The United States is caught in governance gridlock over an unwillingness on the part of a significant segment of policy makers to consider tax increases for the wealthy and for the corporations.  The outdated, trickle-down notion being that such increases will act as a disincentive for job creation.  Canada is in the process of reducing its corporate tax rates yet again.

In the meantime, the cash-rich corporations, apparently bereft of any further entrepreneurial imagination -- which might indeed create employment -- are using their 'surplus' cash to buy back their own shares.

Does anyone else have the sense that the Matrix is in the process of being torn wide open?