MY STORY

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After leaving my employment with the Government of the Northwest Territories I learned that my former email was active and continuing to be monitored. I learned this after receiving a text from a former employee of mine who had received some good news following a history of personal and health concerns. 

You see, my former employee had sent an email to my former work email giving me good news regarding a recent cancer scare.  

This person received no autoreply or any other messaging to notify them that I was no longer at the Government of the Northwest Territories.  

Instead, this person followed this email up with a phone call to my former office and they were shocked to discover that my former email was being monitored by my former supervisor, the Director of Legal Registries. 

A reasonable person would expect that this email, of obviously personal content, would easily be identified as such and forwarded to my attention, right?

To be clear here, I am not offended because this information was my personal information, it was not. My offense here comes from the fact that this was the personal health information of another person that was meant for me, not for someone monitoring my former email account. 

I made an Access to Information Request to both the Technology Service Centre and the Department of Justice looking to finally get the personal emails that may have been sent to my former work email following my leaving my employment with the Government of the Northwest Territories. The responses I received could not have been more different.

Technology Service Centre (TSC):   

The TSC responded to my request by informing me that the emails I requested had been deleted as per the GNWT Document Retention/Destruction Policy—simply put, waiting almost 4 years to request these documents was too long to wait—they informed me that it was now impossible to retrieve these emails.    

Department of Justice:   In stark contrast to the reply from the TSC, the Department of Justice was able to provide a number of emails containing personal content, including the cancer scare email mentioned earlier.    

The Department of Justice later confirmed that these select emails were retained beyond the period specified by the GNWT Document Destruction Policy.    

No explanation has been provided regarding why these select emails were exempted from destruction under the GNWT Document Destruction Policy.