An Ottawa museum can release documents about a public exhibition without endangering federal-provincial relations, the Information Commissioner has ruled.
Caroline Maynard, the Information Commissioner of Canada, delivered the ruling in a report dated March 28, although the documents in question will not be released until after May 21, the deadline for interested parties to seek a judicial review of her decision.
The case involves Montreal art historian Jamie Jelinski, who has been seeking documents about a forensics collection partly held at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City. Items in the collection, including the skull of one murder victim and the bones of another, have been shown there and also lent out for exhibitions. One such exhibit took place in 2006 at Ingenium, the science and technology museum in Ottawa.
Despite these public exhibits, the Quebec museum has refused Jelinski access to information about the displays under the direction of the Quebec coroner’s office, which now believes that the human remains – dating to the 1920s and 1930s and originally held by the provincial forensics lab – should never have been displayed.
Frustrated at the provincial level, Jelinski applied to see information about a forensics show entitled Autopsy of a Murder that was exhibited at two federal institutions: the Montreal Science Centre and Ingenium. The Ottawa museum declined to release its documentation, which includes exhibit photography and condition reports. It argued that Quebec’s Access to Information Commission had already determined that releasing images of the remains violated the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as well as privacy laws, and that interfering in provincial affairs in this manner could jeopardize future exchanges.
Maynard, who pointed out that photographs of the remains and documentation about their exhibition are not the objects themselves, dismissed this argument as unspecific: “Ingenium has failed to identify any specific harm to the conduct of federal-provincial affairs that could flow from the disclosure of the images. Ingenium made reference to ‘document sharing’ between organizations being potentially affected, but did not provide an explanation beyond that, nor did it make the connection to federal-provincial affairs.”
She also said that, whatever the Quebec law, the federal law under which she operates and which covers Ingenium does not recognize privacy rights for persons dead more than 20 years.
The remains were assembled almost a century ago by pioneering Quebec pathologist Wilfrid Derome without the consent of the victims’ families. The forensics lab transferred the entire collection, which also includes scrapbooks of crime scene photography, to the Museum of Civilization in 1997 before reclaiming the human remains in 2020, having belatedly raised privacy concerns about releasing images.
The Quebec coroner’s office has also counselled the Museum of Civilization not to release information, arguing it would violate the Coroners Act. That office has also blocked attempts by other museums to release information about the exhibits. When Maynard ordered the Montreal Science Centre to release the documentation, the coroner’s office sought a judicial review, which is now waiting on a decision from Federal Court. In her submission to that court, Maynard warned that a provincial institution should not be allowed to overrule the federal Information Commissioner.
“The commissioner is mainly concerned about a collateral attack on her order by the coroner in this case. The repercussions of such an attack … could harm the integrity of the legislative regime and the commissioner’s capacity to exercise her mandate.”
Thus far the Montreal Science Centre has not released the information to Jelinski, who specializes in the social history of tattooing and became aware of the Derome collection because it contains tattoos on pieces of skin cut from the body of a murder victim.
Meanwhile, the coroner’s office says its legal department is still evaluating whether it should intervene in this second case and seek another judicial review.
Kate Taylor