Yukon court upholds privacy watchdog’s right to summon Justice staff

Privacy commissioner sought testimony and records on how jail‐video requests were handled

Yukon court upholds privacy watchdog’s right to summon Justice staff Published 11:00 am Thursday, July 16, 2026 The Yukon Supreme Court has dismissed a pair of petitions from the territorial government that sought to overturn summonses issued to five Justice Department employees by the territory’s privacy commissioner. Chief Justice Suzanne Duncan released the decision on July 7.

She found the Information and Privacy Commissioner acted within its legal authority when it ordered the employees to testify and provide information during an investigation into a denied request for video footage from the Whitehorse Correctional Centre. The case stems from a 2025 access-to-information request for surveillance footage from the jail’s Arrest Processing Unit. The Justice Department told the requester no records existed, saying the recordings were controlled by the RCMP and outside the reach of Yukon’s access law.

But the Information and Privacy Commissioner later learned the department had actually retrieved 105 hours of footage from an RCMP server before denying the request. That prompted the commissioner to launch an investigation on his own motion, questioning whether the department had complied with the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The government argued the summonses were an overreach, saying the Information and Privacy Commissioner was seeking information beyond the scope of its investigation and that employees had already provided everything relevant through affidavits and statutory declarations.

It also said forcing staff to testify amounted to an unnecessary hardship. Duncan rejected those arguments. She wrote that the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s fact‐finding powers are broad and that courts must defer to statutory bodies acting within their mandates.

She found the summonses were tied to the investigation and sought information relevant to determining whether the department followed the law. She noted the Information and Privacy Commissioner had raised several unanswered factual questions, including how staff accessed RCMP‐controlled footage, why the department’s position differed from a previous similar case, and what plans existed for handling future video requests. Those questions, Duncan said, justified asking for staff testimony.

The judge also dismissed the claim of hardship, saying no evidence supported the idea that attending a hearing would be overly burdensome. She recommended that the Information and Privacy Commissioner provide time estimates to employees and consider whether all five need to testify once evidence is gathered. The government further argued the Information and Privacy Commissioner could not demand employees bring internal records, since those documents belong to the Yukon government.

Duncan agreed that the summonses should be amended so that the request for records is directed at the department itself rather than at individual staff, but she upheld the commissioner’s right to obtain them. In her conclusion, Duncan wrote that the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s investigation aligns with its role of ensuring public bodies comply with access‐to‐information laws. She found no abuse of process and said the commissioner is entitled to determine whether additional testimony is needed.

Contact Jake Howarth at jake.howarth@yukon-news.com