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By rdnewsNOW staff

Activities and Challenges

Information and Privacy Commissioner publishes 2024-25 Annual Report

Dec 11, 2025 | 2:00 PM

The 2024-25 Annual Report of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) of Alberta was tabled by the Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly on Wednesday and has now been published online by the OIPC.

“The 2024-25 fiscal year was one that saw good progress toward meeting our goals,” said Commissioner Diane McLeod, in a press release. “Along with that, we tackled a number of complex challenges that took a great deal of time and resources to surmount.”

OIPC officials say their office continued its ongoing work to streamline procedures for settlement of review and complaint files and for review of privacy impact assessments and breach reports. This is said to be part of the work toward the Commissioner’s goal to enhance internal processes to support the office’s legislative mandate and improve timelines.

Officials say legislative reform was a significant focus throughout the year because all three of the laws that set out the office’s mandate were under review.

“We were pleased to see the reviews undertaken, given that the laws are outdated and require modernization,” said McLeod. “However, undertaking reviews of all three laws in such a short period of time was a tremendous amount of work.”

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OIPC officials say the 2023-24 Annual Report outlined the major concern of abandoned health records. According to officials, these cases continue to be on the rise, putting patients’ health information at risk.

During the 2024-25 fiscal year, the OIPC began to see an uptick in the use of virtual care and artificial intelligence (AI) in the health sector, and the office devoted resources to understanding the associated benefits and risks and to providing education and guidance to custodians under the Health Information Act, as well as other Albertans.

For example, officials say the office developed a guidance document to help custodians meet their obligations regarding the use of such technologies, to provide deeper understanding of the privacy risks and to suggest ways to mitigate them.

The OIPC says there were a significant number of formal investigations generated by the Commissioner open and ongoing during 2024-25. A total of 163 formal investigations were said to be open at the end of the fiscal year.

“These high numbers are partially due to the nature of some of the investigations,” commented McLeod. “In some cases they were ‘umbrella’ investigations including multiple files that are related to each other. One example is the systemic investigation into 27 Government of Alberta departments under the FOIP Act.”

Officials note, the Commissioner also launched 51 informal investigations in 2024-25, with 42 being the result of the PowerSchool breach involving educational bodies in Alberta.

The OIPC says the Commissioner also added a new section to this year’s annual report to highlight an ongoing challenge with judicial reviews.

“Over the years, the number of judicial reviews of OIPC orders has generally been on the increase, resulting in significant demands on our resources,” said Mcleod. “Participating in these legal actions has cost the office about $3.5 million up to June of this year. This is a significant cost to taxpayers, which is even greater when one considers that the majority of the bodies who judicially review our orders are public bodies, whose activities are also paid for through taxes.”

Officials say the annual report addresses these and other issues in greater detail and describes the work of the office throughout 2024-25. The report is available on the OIPC website here.