BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
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The director of information technology at Elections BC has been put on administrative leave while the organization looks into a recent B.C. Supreme Court judgment that found he breached privacy rules in a previous job.
The judgment found that Guy Gondor had copied private information to aid his son in a bylaw dispute while working as IT manager at the District of Saanich on Vancouver Island.
“While on leave, he does not have access to any Elections BC systems, data or offices,” says an emailed statement from an Elections BC spokesperson.
Gondor went to work for Elections BC after leaving his job at the District of Saanich. The allegations in question date back to February of 2022, but only surfaced shortly after he began working for Elections BC in April of 2023.
This raised concerns among privacy advocates about the security of personal information at Elections BC.
“There’s an obvious concern that the public has with this,” said Jason Woywada of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA), a non-profit watchdog group. Woywada reached out to Elections BC with concerns about Gondor soon after the judgment was released. “Electoral authorities need to have some of the highest and most stringent cybersecurity and privacy awareness.”
Because Elections BC holds information about every registered voter in B.C., as well as people that have asked not to be registered, it has one of the most comprehensive lists of B.C. resident’s names and contact information in existence, Woywada said.
“The key thing for us was just getting a better understanding of what they were doing and how they were managing that,” Woywada said. “And what steps they were taking to ensure that the privacy and security of personal information was being maintained.”
Elections BC put Gondor on administrative leave on June 28, a week after the B.C. Supreme Court Justice ruling. He will continue to be paid while the Elections BC executive team reviews the court decision to determine the next steps.
The ruling against Gondor was made in civil court, and he has not been convicted of a crime related to this privacy breach. He did not immediately respond to a voicemail left for him by Black Press Media on Monday (July 8).
The investigation began after Gondor’s son sent an email on March 24, 2022 to the District of Saanich complaining about his neighbours that had private documents attached which he shouldn’t justifiably have had access to. That same month someone anonymously sent the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner two DVDs containing that same private information, in an apparent attempt to blow the whistle on the breach.
An independent investigation by accounting firm KPMG found Gondor’s computer was the only one to have copied that information, and that it was copied shortly before Gondor left his job at the district on Feb. 17, 2022. .
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