Alberta’s Public Safety and Emergency Services department must search for Edmonton Remand Centre CCTV recordings, including in archives, after an adjudicator found it had never adequately explained why footage expressly requested in 2018 was missing from its access response.
In Order FOIP2026-28, dated September 14, 2026, adjudicator John Gabriele of Alberta’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner also ordered disclosure of specified information and a fresh exercise of discretion over other withheld records. The decision concerns access to information about reported assaults on correctional officers and a related lockdown, not the merits of those events.
The passage of eight years did not excuse the failure to account for the recordings when the request was first answered. Gabriele acknowledged that administrative lag at the commissioner’s office had largely caused the delay, but concluded that the department should have had an explanation for the missing footage from the outset.
An unanswered part of the request
The anonymous applicant made the request on January 2, 2018, to the former Justice and Solicitor General department. Public Safety and Emergency Services later inherited the matter. The request sought records about the reported assaults, the lockdown, management’s response and related measures, and expressly included CCTV recordings.
The department located 108 pages and released them with portions withheld under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act’s personal-privacy, law-enforcement and advice exceptions. It did not locate CCTV footage. Investigation and mediation led to substantial additional disclosure, but disputes remained over personal privacy and advice from officials. Section 20, the law-enforcement exception, was not contested at the inquiry.
The inquiry initially focused on sections 17 and 24. Gabriele added the duty-to-assist issue after the applicant again raised the missing recordings and the department’s answers failed to establish that the issue had been addressed. That additional inquiry was confined to CCTV footage; it was not a review of the department’s entire search for other records.
Section 10(1) required every reasonable effort to assist the applicant and an open, accurate and complete response. The adjudicator explained that this includes a reasonable search and, where the circumstances require it, meaningful information about why no further responsive records have been found.
The department said its ordinary retention schedule generally kept CCTV footage for 30 days. It described an exception for incident-report footage, retained for four years provided no litigation or access request was pending, and said recordings meeting investigation criteria would ultimately go to archives. It nevertheless asserted that it could not search because the records would have been dealt with under that schedule. These were the department’s explanations of its retention arrangements, not findings that particular recordings had actually been destroyed.
Gabriele found that footage could reasonably be expected to be held in an archive because of the access review or an investigation. The department had not supplied particulars explaining why a search was impossible, even after being asked for them. Its assertion that no records remained appeared to rest on elapsed time rather than a new search, including a search of archives.
Although the department identified the people and offices involved in the original search, it said it could no longer identify particular databases, program areas or physical locations searched. It also relied on the original searchers’ subject-matter expertise. Gabriele found that this did not answer the practical question of whether expressly requested CCTV recordings had been sought and accounted for.
Delay did not remove the original duty
The department did not specifically argue that delay had prejudiced it. Gabriele nevertheless considered fairness because the commissioner’s office was largely responsible for the administrative delay. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s decision in Blencoe, he recognized that delay can impair a party’s ability to answer a case when evidence or witnesses are no longer available.
He found no such prejudice here. The request came less than three weeks after the December 15, 2017 lockdown and sought recordings concerning the preceding period. That timing made the absence of an explanation especially important in light of the department’s own 30-day retention account. Whether recordings existed had not even been addressed in its response.
The resulting order requires a search of possible archives and an explanation to the applicant of the steps taken, search scope, possible repositories, searchers’ identities and reasons for believing no further responsive footage exists. It does not establish that footage has now been found or require the release of recordings regardless of any applicable access exception.
Privacy required a record-by-record assessment
The applicant did not seek inmates’ names, pictures or other identifying information, or employee and third-party telephone numbers. Those details could remain withheld. But Gabriele found that unit locations listed in assault charts could be disclosed separately from the inmate-identifying columns.
The distinction turned on the statutory definition of personal information: recorded information about an identifiable individual. A unit location might reveal something personal when linked to a named inmate, but with the identifying information removed, the remaining location information was de-identified. The order required release of the specified location columns, not inmate identities.
A different result applied to Facebook names and pictures associated with comments already disclosed to the applicant. Identifying the people would reveal that they held Facebook accounts and, in some cases, connect them with their opinions. With no established circumstances favouring disclosure sufficient to overcome the privacy presumption, the adjudicator upheld those redactions.
For particular employee names on another page, the surrounding employment-history information remained separately withheld under section 20. Revealing the names alone would show only that the individuals were public employees. Gabriele ordered those specific names disclosed; he did not order release of their protected employment histories or create a general rule requiring disclosure of every employee identifier.
Advice protection was not a blanket answer
Section 24 permits withholding certain advice, recommendations, consultations and deliberations, as well as unimplemented personnel or administrative plans. Gabriele distinguished information revealing the decision-making process from final decisions, which the advice provisions do not protect merely because they emerge from deliberations. Ordinary factual summaries also require a connection with protected advice that cannot be severed.
Some withheld passages consisted of final decisions. Management changes described in the records had also been implemented on December 15, 2017, before the access request, defeating reliance on the exception for unimplemented plans. Advice about those plans could still qualify for protection. The adjudicator ordered disclosure of the particular passages identified in the order rather than directing release of all management records.
For information that did fall within section 24, the department still had to exercise its discretion properly. It argued that disclosure would expose preliminary strategies and internal reasoning, discourage candid discussion and potentially compromise management strategies in a sensitive correctional setting.
Gabriele found that explanation incomplete. It considered possible negative effects without weighing the applicant’s interests, open government or the benefits of disclosure and non-disclosure. The suggestion that officials might become more guarded was a general assertion that could apply to any advice record, rather than an assessment tied to the information at issue. The department was ordered to reconsider, not automatically disclose, the remaining information covered by the advice exception.
The department must notify the adjudicator in writing that it has complied within 50 days of receiving the order. The decision leaves the outcome of the renewed CCTV search open, while requiring the department to account for it and to distinguish information that must remain private from information that can be released.
