LEGAL HISTORIAN WAS B.C.’S FIRST PRIVACY COMMISSIONER

A collector of Canadian ceramics, he gave generously to artists and arts organizations, such as the Pacific Opera Victoria, where he served two terms as board chairman

The late Jim Flaherty, finance minister in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, once introduced his brother David, the speaker at a formal dinner in Toronto, as “the one with the real brains in the family.” Without benefit of a law degree, David Flaherty cut a path through the newly planted field of privacy law, taught at some of the top universities in the U.S. and Canada, wrote or edited a dozen scholarly books, was selected from 300 applicants to be the first Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia in 1993, and went on to have a deep impact on the cultural life of his adopted city of Victoria.

“He established the office [of privacy commissioner] from scratch, starting out in a basement room of the Legislature with only a phone and one seconded assistant,” said Murray Rankin, attorneygeneral of B.C. in a tribute to Prof. Flaherty. “He was a pioneer in that role as he was in so many other endeavours. He had so much energy. And he was fearless. His efforts gave real meaning to the new duty for politicians and bureaucrats to disclose information [but also] to protect personal information.”

After an illustrious teaching career in London, Ont., at the University of Western Ontario, Prof. Flaherty found in the B.C. capital not only a second career as privacy commissioner and, later, a busy consultant on privacy protection, but also a second wife: Karen Jensen, a real estate agent whom he met when he was 66.

Both of them had a sophisticated appreciation of the pleasures of the table and were members of La Confrerie de La Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, an international dining society whose roots go back to prerevolutionary France. It was this gastronomic connection that led to their meeting.

Their happy union lasted 16 years till his death from prostate cancer in Victoria on Oct. 11. Prof. Flaherty was 82.

Prof. Flaherty gave generously to Pacific Opera Victoria over the past decade and he served two terms as its board chairman. The money he gave helped to fund upgrades to the Baumann Centre, the company’s home, which had originally been a rundown church hall. It now has an elevator, a commercial kitchen and other modern improvements. Victoria’s municipal art museum and its symphony also benefited from Prof. Flaherty’s largesse.

Jon Tupper, recently retired as the director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, was a close friend who admired the breadth of Prof. Flaherty’s interests: “He was a scholar and an intellectual and he read history and biographies but he also understood pottery and ceramics,” Mr. Tupper said. “He had a fine collection of Canadian ceramics in his house. He was always giving to arts organizations and to individual artists, and encouraging others to do it. I learned a lot from him.”

David Harris Flaherty was born Feb. 25, 1940, in Campbellton, N.B., into a devout Catholic family, the eldest of eight children. His father, Edwin Flaherty, had a chemical company specializing in products used by the forestry industry while his mother Mary (née Harquail) was busy having babies. The family relocated to Montreal a couple of years later.

“David was always trying to get away from his family, not because he didn’t love them, but because he was sick and tired of constantly changing diapers,” Ms. Jensen said. (The youngest of his seven siblings was not born till he was 16.) When David was 14 he escaped to a boarding school run by the Christian Brothers in Scarborough, Ont., thinking that he would enter the order. “The school was strict but it suited him and he did well. His time was divided among studying, sports, and working in the laundry. On Sunday nights, the boys – there were 100 of them in the school – were allowed to watch The Ed Sullivan Show.”

The Christian Brothers, recognizing his abilities, later sent him to Edmonton to attend St. Joseph’s, a Catholic college of the University of Alberta. Over the next two years he discovered scholarship and girls, and asked to be released from his vows. “He had already been given his monk name when he realized he couldn’t do it,” Ms. Jensen said.

He returned to Montreal and transferred to McGill, winning the gold medal in history when he graduated with his BA in 1962. That same year he married Kathryn Kindellun from a large and wealthy Catholic family and the two moved to New York so that he could continue graduate work at Columbia University.

At Columbia, the young Canadian studied with Alan Westin, a civil libertarian who defined a new field of inquiry with his 1967 book Privacy and Freedom, the first on the subject. Computers were being developed and so were databases that could accumulate such things as credit ratings, police records, driving offences, medical conditions.

The title of Prof. Westin’s book itself helped define the privacy field and indicate why it matters. He argued that an essential aspect of freedom is control over one’s personal information and defined the four states of privacy as solitude, intimacy, anonymity and reserve.

It was while he was in New York working on his doctorate, that David Flaherty discovered he could obtain student tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Opera became his lifelong passion. He particularly loved Mozart’s Magic Flute, the first opera whose production he sponsored much later in Victoria.

Teaching stints at Princeton University and the University of Virginia followed before he completed his doctorate in 1967. In the 1970s, he was a fellow at Harvard in liberal arts, a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford and visiting scholar at Stanford. He and Kathryn adopted two boys, Sean and Michael, and later had a third son, Robert, but their life was unsettled and the marriage was cracking under the strain.

According to Ms. Jensen, the couple had planned to take out U.S. citizenship but after the assassination of the two Kennedys they decided to return to Canada with their boys. The marriage ended in 1988. Prof. Flaherty became professor of history and law, and in 1984, founding director of the Centre for American Studies at Western, one of the very few universities in Canada to offer such a program. Meanwhile he was researching and writing authoritative studies such as Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies (1989), a survey of privacy laws in Germany, Sweden, France, Canada and the U.S.

He left Western on a leave of absence for a stint as B.C.’s privacy commissioner, thinking he might return to teach there again but Victoria held him fast. During his official tenure he wrote some 300 determinations.

He greatly influenced David Loukidelis, B.C.’s second privacy commissioner, who admired Prof. Flaherty’s reasoning and his ability to analyze privacy legislation. Mr. Loukidelis recalled in an interview: “He ran the organization in an efficient, astute way and he kept the staffing lean. When I was there, we had 21 people working in the office. He recognized talent and saw potential in people. I remember he hired a woman with only a community college degree, no university, but he knew she could do the job.”

“He loved good food, wine, was curious about people; he was always reading history or the latest Booker or Giller Prize winner. He spoke his mind – he had an edge – but he was not rude. Even at 82, he was direct.”

In 2018, David Flaherty received an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria. Royal Roads University gave him its chancellor’s Community Recognition Award.

Predeceased by his brothers Ted and Jim Flaherty, he leaves his wife, Karen; sons, Sean, Michael and Robert; stepchildren, Jake and Alex; sisters, Ann, Norah and Mary; brothers, Gerry and Patrick; and five grandchildren.