Given global trends in the development of privacy laws and enforcement, Canada and several provinces are looking at modernizing their respective privacy regimes. Ontario’s new proposed privacy law, which would govern commercial activities more broadly than current legislation (i.e., our
The Government of Ontario announced that it intends to introduce amendments to the Province’s Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) that, if passed, would strengthen privacy rules with respect to health records, make it easier to prosecute offences, and increase fines for privacy breaches.
In a recent case involving a breach of patients’ privacy rights — Hopkins v Kay,[i] — the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that a proposed class action could proceed based on allegations of violation of patients’ common law privacy rights, concluding that those rights were not preempted by the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA). Specifically, the court determined that PHIPA is not a “complete code” and therefore did not “oust” the plaintiff’s common law tort claim for breach of privacy (the tort of intrusion upon seclusion). Hopkins provides important guidance in the fields of privacy law and class actions, as well as with respect to the sustainability of privacy claims that touch upon areas governed by legislation.