Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Back in July of this year, the Department of Health and Social Services apparently mailed 195 personal NWT health care cards to the wrong addresses. According to the department’s own words, “This was due to a spreadsheet sorting error.” Interestingly, the department immediately claimed that there were no privacy concerns with this mistake. Today my questions will be for the Minister of Health and Social Services.
This is the first time the Minister has been able to comment on this privacy breach since July. Could the Minister clearly inform the House what exactly transpired with these 195 personal NWT health care cards? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. One hundred and ninety-six health care cards were actually delivered to the wrong address and what happened is exactly what the Member identified, is addresses were messed up on a spreadsheet. One hundred and ten of those 196 cards were returned to us having never been opened, which means that there were about 86 that were not received back.
We, as a government, as a department, are monitoring the use of those cards and trying to make sure that they are not being used inappropriately by the wrong person. Everybody that was affected, all 196 were notified so they knew that had happened. So we will continue to monitor those 86 outstanding cards and the problem has been fixed, it was a human error and we’ve changed the process so it won’t occur again. Thank you.
I appreciate the Minister’s reply, but to the question of privacy, why is it that we’re not considering this a breach of privacy, and again I’ll ask the Minister, why does he not address that question of privacy breach? Thank you.
The wrong addresses on the card would not give the individuals who received the card the ability to access any of the actual individual’s health care information. Thank you.
Thank you. I tend to disagree with the Minister here. The reason why is one only has to do simple Internet searches to see that stolen health care cards are linked to serious fraud-related and false health care claims from every part of Canada, costing taxpayers millions.
So again, to the Minister, what steps were taken to ensure, now we’re hearing 195 or 196 cards, not 195 cards, were collected, were redistributed to the proper owner or destroyed? Again, we heard that there are still 86 outstanding. Where are those cards? Thank you.
One hundred and ninety-six cards were mailed in error, 110 of them came back, 86 of them are outstanding. We have made efforts to get those cards back. We have notified all of the affected individuals and we will continue to monitor those cards to make sure that there is no unusual activity on those cards. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess we’re getting nowhere fast here. We know that the Information and Privacy Commissioner is conducting some sort of audit on these misdirected health care cards.
While we’re waiting for the results of the investigation, what assurances can the Minister provide this House that this mistake won’t happen again? Thank you.
Thank you. As I indicated, this was a human error. We have reviewed the processes that were being utilized in that particular office, and we have put in safeguards to make sure that there’s now a process of double-checking the cards and double-checking the data to make sure that anything that is printed on the cards is accurate. So we have actually made the changes to the steps and the protocols on those cards. It should not happen again. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
