Compromised voters’ information

Also: Hydro One rescues, "seat saver" decisions.

Compromising voters' personal information 
We have yet to resolve a clutch of electoral glitches arising from the 2011 federal election, such as alleged robo-calling and the overturning of the Etobicoke Centre result. Now we have a big, fat electoral records screw-up at the Ontario level, where we don't yet have more than a rumoured by-election, let alone a province-wide contest.

The names and addresses of voters are of course deserving of the most careful protection by Elections Ontario or by any other official entity empowered to compile such highly sensitive private info.

Before we go any further, it would be worth recalling how much the ground has recently shifted in regard to handling personal information. Before the 1999 introduction of the Permanent Register of Electors, we used to nail up hard copies of polling lists on every telephone pole naming Mr & Ms Electorate and all the little Ballots, and giving their home address.

Back then, gender was pretty well taken at face value or inferred from names — though the range of variations now operative would have astonished our fore-parents. Back then, it would have upset pretty well everyone, not just the small group of privacy mavens, to see the person's name marked as having voted or not. And divulging our date of birth is surely now recognized by all but cyber dullards as opening us to that scourge of modern communications, identity theft.

The problem here is not what Elections Ontario put on a data stick but how badly it failed to apply its own policies respecting what EO boss Greg Essensa calls "the management and care of personal information". His July 18 media statement says that USB keys used to carry personal information "must be password protected and encrypted" and be kept in the custody of EO personnel. We know two USBs which have gone AWOL were not thus secured, at least on the night before their loss was discovered.

IQP asked Information & Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian to assess the scale of and implications of the OE breach. The Commissioner cannot think of a bigger breach, and she also says that if anyone can turn the current situation around, it would be Essensa. But Cavoukian declares herself "driven to distraction" by the mismatch between adoption of policies which provide fully satisfactory protection for stored personal information and the failure to ensure that said policies are operative in practice.

We can obtain state of the art encryption in Ontario, from companies like CryptoMill Technologies, a Toronto-based data security software company. CryptoMill's product offerings include encryption on laptops, desktops, USB drives and all forms of removable storage media. With CryptoMill's technology, organizations can embrace the use of laptops and USB devices, knowing that the content is encrypted, and unreadable by unauthorized parties.

It's good to have Commissioner Cavoukian and her staff help agencies like EO, which asked for IPCO's assistance in this breach some two weeks ago. Much better would be for the commission to work preventively on a training blitz of government departments, ABCs and BPS organizations so that practice matches policies.

Hydro One to the rescue 
Ontario has lately had to endure extraordinary summer heat. Unlike the millions of Americans whose ordeal by Celsius was unleashed by furious storms, we have not had to face the challenge without electricity to power air conditioners and pump water. To help the stricken regions recover, Hydro One has sent more than 200 skilled linesmen, foresters and other specialists with trucks, heavy equipment and other "power restoration resources". And the needed help is delivering: in six days, the Hydro One work group assigned to the Baltimore area trimmed the number of households without power from 800k to 50k. Hydro One's other work groups were sent to Virginia and Washington, DC.

There has been a formal mutual aid protocol in the electrical distribution field since 1955 under the aegis of an association of utilities rather grandly called the Edison Electric Institute. Costs of recovery resources are met fully by the utility requesting help.

In 2007, Hydro One was the only non-US utility to receive the Edison Electric Institute's "Emergency Recovery Award". The most recent of these "mutual aid" ventures have involved sending Ontario crews to help local utilities in Boston, Florida, Ohio, Vermont and the Carolinas. But of course the helping hands are extended in both directions, as when US crews came north to help undo damage to the grid inflicted by the 1998 ice storm. And comparable resource sharing operates in other fields, eg, concentrating water bombers and other specialized equipment from various jurisdictions to contain wild fires in remote forest districts.

The costly "seat saver" sale 
NDP Energy critic Peter Tabuns had plenty of time to come up with his nifty "seat-savers" zinger to skewer the Liberals over electorally motivated closures of two south-west GTA electricity generating plants during the October 2011 election. Deriding the McGuinty government's belated cave-in — to NIMBY sentiments he had earlier sworn to resist as partisan — was very much on point and funny enough to become a continuing jibe.

Whether Energy minister Chris Bentley sees the droll side is open to doubt. His July 13 news conference stating that the decision had been made by the Liberal campaign, not by the government, and fixing the bottom-line cost at $180 million, has now been flatly contradicted on both points by finance Minister and Deputy Premier Dwight Duncan. The latter admission followed the Toronto Sun's July 15 exclusive report of an additional $10 million pay-out. Duncan has expressed hope that the cost won't climb further. He said "There are absolutely no other costs that I am aware of, and I think that's the total tab". Good luck with that, Finance minister. The combination of absolute assurance that there are no more costs and the honest qualification as to his awareness of additional costs, wrapped up his thinking that the tab won't grow.

Not so long ago, major public infrastructure projects such as SkyDome invariably exceeded budget figures, and there's no guarantee that tendency has vanished.

The "seat-saver" spat could yet do more damage to all three parties. Bentley's news release asserted that both opposition parties agreed with the decision to cancel both the plants, a contention that the PCs and NDP have not very vigourously refuted. This strikes IQP as unwise, given the Liberals' skill in political communication.

Yesterday, indeed, Premier McGuinty declared that voters don't get all that exercised about election promises, the bill for which they expect to pick up one way or the other. That shouldn't be dismissed, for the premier is surely correct that many think that way.

Ssshhh!!! 
That's the title of a cheeky TV spot, run first during the evening TV news on June 25 and paid for by the York Region unit of the militant Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. The 5,000 ETFO members in York, led by Dave Clegg, that union's former Ontario president, have expended more than $100,000 of their dues to craft an ad which twits Dalton McGuinty. Responding to an aide who cites groups critical of the government, the McGuinty character blames them for wasting money on ORNGE and E-health.

Further exposure to the ETFO ad is planned when the summer holidays are over, Clegg says. The money saved by not contributing to pro-government ads run by the Working Families Coalition is likely to be quite enough to finance such one-off ads or even a series readied for electoral use by anti-WFC interests.

© Copyright 2012 Inside Queen's Park, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca