Files containing the personal information of two inmates were left on a plane for months, the NWT’s privacy commissioner says, while a recording of an inmate’s call with a lawyer was inadvertently given to police in a “very serious breach.”
The incidents are documented in reports recently made public by the office of territorial information and privacy commissioner Andrew Fox.
In January this year, paper files containing personal data, photos and employment histories of two inmates were left on a plane after corrections staff escorted the inmates to a jail.
The files were only discovered in May when an aircraft maintenance worker found them in an overhead bin. (The airline, communities and inmates involved were not specified.)
Fox expressed concern that nobody noticed the files’ absence for four months and suggested the possibility of a “systemic issue” in how these files are handled.
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“There was a real risk of significant harm,” he wrote, urging the NWT Department of Justice to add “appropriate, reasonable safeguards.” He said the department had told him it planned to use a secure bag for the files in future.
Lawyer call given to police
Separately, Fox reported on a June 2025 phone call between a North Slave Correctional Complex inmate and their lawyer about the inmate’s potential sentencing. Again, the people involved were not named, which is standard practice in privacy reports.
In theory, all calls at the Yellowknife jail are recorded for security purposes except ones between inmates and lawyers that have solicitor-client privilege, meaning nobody else is allowed to hear them unless the inmate expressly says it’s OK. Inmates have the right to discuss their case with their lawyer in private.
However, this call was handed over to police along with recordings of the inmate’s other calls in response to a court order later that year, even though the court order warned that privileged calls shouldn’t be included.
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Police officers who received the recording realized the error and “took steps to isolate the recording,” Fox stated. Eventually, the Department of Justice reported the error to Fox.
He set out three big problems: a sign warning inmates about recorded calls is badly worded, the system used to tape calls unfairly places the burden on inmates and lawyers to avoid having their call recorded, and corrections staff didn’t bother checking the recordings before handing them to police.
The sign next to the jail’s phones warns that “all telecommunications are recorded and may be listened to other than those that are deemed to be privileged correspondence/communication.”
Fox said this is wordy and hard to understand if your reading ability isn’t strong, and it doesn’t explain who is doing the “deeming” or what rules they’re using.
The recording system used – known as Synergy – only excludes inmate-to-lawyer calls if the system is fed the lawyer’s number in advance, Fox asserted. If the lawyer’s number isn’t on a special list, the call gets recorded (with an audible warning that, in this case, neither the inmate nor the lawyer seem to have grasped).
“The Synergy system effectively puts the onus of preventing the recording of a privileged communication on the inmate or the lawyer,” Fox wrote.
“As efficient as this may seem, the responsibility for complying with [privacy rules] rests with the public body, not private individuals.”
Lastly, Fox said, officials at the jail should have checked the recordings before handing them to police.
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That this check did not occur “reflects the approach underlying the Synergy system: Justice relies on the system and the inmates to ensure no privileged communication is recorded,” Fox wrote.
“This case demonstrates that this system is not reliable.”
Fox ordered the Department of Justice to stop collecting recordings of privileged calls. He said the department is now reviewing changes “that would eradicate the possibility of inadvertently recording privileged communications.”
