On June 21, 2022, Frances Widdowson received a letter from Jill Clayton, the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Clayton was responding to a complaint that Widdowson filed against MRU claiming that MRU had “collected, used or disclosed personal information in contravention of Part 2 of the FOIP Act”. Clayton asked that MRU “submit a response to the complaint by July 22, 2022” and stated that the date of completion for the investigation would be July 31, 2023.
In her complaint of January 30, 2022, Frances Widdowson maintained that her “personal information was disclosed to third parties by Dr. Jennifer Pettit, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Mount Royal University”. In this complaint, Widdowson alleged that Dr. Pettit sent an email to 32 people stating that Widdowson was no longer employed at MRU. This email was then forwarded to 22 part-time members of Widdowson’s department. Fifty-four people in all received the notification. Widdowson noted that she had endured a number of harms from this disclosure, the most serious being that it was “leaked” to Renae Watchman who was found to have harassed Widdowson in May 2021. The information that Watchman received, because of Pettit’s disclosure, enabled Watchman to further harass Widdowson by gloating with others about the termination.
The email from Dean Pettit was provided as an attachment.
Widdowson also provided numerous other attachments that illustrated the harm that had been caused (only the attachments pertaining to the discussions up to December 22, 2021 have been uploaded).
