I’ll admit to be a little jaundiced when I hear about yet another screw-up in a B.C. government ministry. It’s pretty much same old same old for this sorry lot. Bureaucrats or elected officials bungle a job or botch it completely, try to hide the fact and then, and only then, fess up and make a halfhearted apology with a promise not to do it again. The latter should be a given — why make the same mistake again when there are so many untapped possibilities?
I didn’t, and still can’t, get particularly wound up about news in January that a hard drive containing data about 3.4 million students and teachers can’t be found. While I can appreciate the unease that the potential for mischief, if not outright crime, might be held on that hard drive, the fact is that just because something can’t be found doesn’t mean it is in the hands of someone who intends to do harm.
A press release last week from the NDP summarizes the problem: “In September 2015, Christy Clark’s government admitted that they had lost an unprotected hard drive which stored more than three million personal student records and thousands of other personal records — including information on health records and financial aid. A new report from the Office of Information and Privacy Commissioner shows that this unprecedented loss of information was completely avoidable, that the hard drive was stored improperly as a cost-saving measure and that the hard drive is still missing.”
Other media reports describe a team of 50 bureaucrats scouring desk drawers and storage boxes last August before passing on information about the loss to the privacy commissioner.
The data is not current, with the information apparently last updated in 2009, so it might not be of obvious value to anyone, but it is easy to sympathize with the unease among parents, students and teachers that confidential info could surface in any number of unpleasant ways.
Education Minister Mike Bernier admits that the breach of security (it should have been encrypted when the data was transferred to another storage format) is unacceptable, and he’s issued the requisite apology. And while the NDP is happy to continue on its rant about the hard drive being misplaced, it has no better ideas about how to find it than anyone else does. A hard drive is not a cellphone — you can’t just call it and listen for the ring tone.
A few decades ago the same issue could have arisen, in the form of a stack of papers. And it would have been a pretty large stack if it listed data about more than three million people. That stack might have been easier to find, though, than a relatively small hard drive, which isn’t much harder to misplace than a ring of keys. Heck, I have an external hard drive at home that I haven’t been able to find for months. And like the missing one from the Ministry of Education, it has information that someone could have mischievous fun with because it backs up all the files on my laptop.
It’s really up to the general public to get up in arms at yet another screw-up in another ministry, and to remember them when the next election rolls around. Not, of course, to say that an NDP government and its bureaucrats would be any more responsible, but the time comes when a price has to be paid for incompetence, doesn’t it? The time comes in every government’s life when complacency sets in, and the entire system gets too entrenched in its ways, becoming more and more isolated from the people it is meant to serve. This government’s “best before” date has definitely passed.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.
