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.