Tuesday Morning Links

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- Brian Topp highlights one of the main lessons coming out of David Miller's time as mayor of Toronto:

The current debate about Toronto’s government and future demonstrates a hard political fact. If citizens cannot see what their government is doing, then, politically, to some extent, it is as if those achievements didn’t happen. It is extremely difficult for any government at any level to communicate what it doing to citizens. Speeches by the chief executive don’t do the job.

Lesson for the future: the next time there is a progressive administration in Toronto, it needs to find a way to clean the dirty boys out of the back door while still operating a muscular and unabashedly political strategic/communications team.

- I'm all for creative efforts to engage citizens online. But keeping in mind the enthusiasm for Rick Mercer's Doris Day petition just a decade ago, what are the odds that the Online Party of Canada won't vote itself out of existence if it's in any danger of getting anywhere?

- Needless to say, it's not at all surprising that knowledge about Sean Bruyea's now-vindicated privacy concerns went all the way to the top. But don't worry: while the PMO is perpetually involved in message control, it does seem to be willing to accept limitations on its power when it comes time to actually doing anything useful:

On Sept. 26, 2006, Shaw wrote Bruyea to inform him that neither the PMO or veterans affairs minister’s office could get involved in the handling of his personal file in order to deal with his benefit entitlements. She referred Bruyea to a department official. The e-mail did not address Bruyea’s concerns about the mishandling of his private information.

- Finally, today's Angus Reid poll would be a lot more meaningful if it hadn't unduly limited its scope to respondents' opinions of the Cons and Libs. But there's still an interesting gap between questions of high-level economic policy - where the Cons have a lead - and the one dealing with jobs which is currently a wash between the two parties included in the poll. And the more Canadians start to distinguish between job issues that affect them directly and more abstract issues like debt and inflation, the more trouble the Cons figure to have in trying to run a campaign on the economy.

On routine breaches

The bombshell news about regular and glaring breaches of Sean Bruyea's privacy by the Department of Veterans Affairs is obviously an important story in and of itself. But while most of the attention figures to be focused on Bruyea's case in particular, it's worth noting that he seems to be far from the only veteran whose privacy was violated:

Mr. Stogran said he was shocked to learn about what had been written about Mr. Bruyea. He said the security officer at the department told him around the time of his appointment in 2007 that his own file had been accessed at least 400 times.

Mr. Stogran said he thought it was just routine curiosity, but is now wondering.

Of course, one of the purposes of privacy law is to ensure that "routine curiosity" can't be satisfied at the expense of individual rights - meaning that Stogran's example too calls out for a follow-up investigation. And if anybody with a remotely high profile can expect to have been subject to similar intrusions which don't appear to have raised any concerns even when information reached the ministerial or PMO levels, then there's ample reason to wonder just what other personal information has been misused - particularly since the Harper Cons started seeing any Canadian with a dissenting view as an enemy to be crushed.