On dangerous mining

The CP reports that as part of their effort to challenge a salary increase for federal judges, Rob Nicholson's Justice Department required the Canada Revenue Agency to provide tax return information about judges appointed since 1995. But while today's story is disturbing enough on its own, I have to wonder whether this is anything but the tip of the iceberg in what information the Cons have squeezed out of the CRA to further their political agenda.

The CP describes the Cons' rationale for demanding the information as follows:

To buttress its position that salaries for federal judges are generally higher than the income they earned as lawyers in private and public practice, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of giving the Canada Revenue Agency a list of the names of 627 judges the federal cabinet appointed to the bench between 1995 and 2007.

The agency was able to match 567 of those judges to their tax records as lawyers, and provided the Justice Department with an aggregated version of the information, with no names attached. A consultant used the data to calculate what the department claimed was an indication of the average increases in salaries and benefits lawyers received after they became judges.

Darren Eke, a spokesman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, issued a brief statement Sunday insisting the government had done nothing wrong.

"Our government respected the independence of the commission in its work and surely did not interfere at any point," said Eke. "To imply otherwise is simply false."

The conclusions reached by the federally hired consultant who analysed the tax information were vociferously challenged by Bienvenu and the judges' data expert.

In letters and submissions during the final stages of the salary deliberations, prominent lawyers the Justice Department retained to settle the conflict argued it was impossible to link the aggregated version of the tax data with the identities of judges whose income was scrutinized.

"The government, outside of CRA itself, and in particular the Department of Justice for purposes of this commission, had no access to the underlying data (the income tax returns)," wrote Neil Finkelstein and Catherine Began Flood.

They acknowledged access that could identify taxpayers is "prohibited by law." The two lawyers, and assistant deputy attorney general Donald Rennie, argued CRA routinely provides anonymous information about professional groups or occupations of taxpayers on an aggregated basis.

From the story, it seems clear by implication that the Cons don't see any problem at all with ordering the CRA to provide them with aggregate information. But let's consider how that kind of information could be misused.

Even to the extent that any request is limited by profession, it's not hard to see how the Cons could use information about income levels to their advantage by similarly demanding aggregated data. Think how useful it might be for the Cons' political operatives to target their fund-raising drives with insider information about which professions are seeing increased income, or a drop in average political donations which might signal room to donate more money.

And the problem only gets worse if the Cons see themselves as entitled to submit any list of names to the CRA for a similar aggregate report, rather than being limited to professions. Want to know whether patronage in a riding is hitting the mark? A simple printout of aggregate income information for all party members within that riding would answer that question in a second. Or aggregate reports could work wonders in further refining a set of demographic classifications - while again providing far more relevant information about who has money available, and who's most likely to be interested in contributing to a political party.

What's worse, it's worth being at least somewhat skeptical as to whether personal information in general - or particularly the type of information being dealt with in this case - is necessarily as anonymous as it seems. While the CRA's data wouldn't itself disclose names or even individual data, it's not at all unlikely that the information can be linked to other data to identify the individuals involved.

For an obvious example in this case, consider what would could be done with aggregated information about how much money the judges in question donated to political parties. The Cons would be able to cross-check the donations by those same judges which have been publicly disclosed against the total amount reported by the CRA to figure out with at least some certainty which ones were - and weren't - included in the report. And enough linked requests using some or all of the same pool of names could theoretically enable a party to reverse-engineer the full tax returns involved without ever technically receiving "identifiable" information in a single report.

Of course, it's not clear that the Cons have indeed crossed the line between information being used for governmental purposes and that which is made available for their partisan use. But in light of their efforts to get there in the past, it's awfully difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Which means that both the affected judges in particular and Canadians in general may have yet another reason to worry about how the Cons are using the trappings of power.