Even the legal bill was off-limits after he sought the file on his own complaint
A workplace harassment investigation ran entirely through a lawyer. When the complainant later asked to see the report on his own complaint, he was refused. Every page was locked behind solicitor-client privilege.
The decision came on July 20, 2026, from Elizabeth Barker, director of adjudication at British Columbia's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. She confirmed that the Provincial Health Services Authority could withhold all 334 pages the former employee had requested, from the investigation emails to the legal invoices, under the province's freedom-of-information law.
A complaint routed through a lawyer
The dispute traces back to a workplace complaint the former employee filed under the health authority's Respectful Workplace Policy. He alleged that two members of its human resources department had bullied, harassed and discriminated against him, according to Barker's account of the file.
Rather than run the review internally, the authority retained an external lawyer to investigate the complaint. According to the sworn affidavit of the authority's executive director and senior legal counsel, that lawyer was engaged to carry out the investigation and to provide legal advice on matters related to the complaint.
Some months later, the former employee filed a freedom-of-information request. He sought the final report, the instructions given to the investigator, all related communications, and a breakdown of what the investigation had cost, including the amounts paid to the investigator and the law firm. The authority refused the request in full, claiming solicitor-client privilege over everything.
Where the line falls on privilege
The former employee did not accept that every document tied to the investigation was off-limits. He submitted that the authority was casting nearly everything connected to the investigation as privileged just because a lawyer had taken part, and that the exercise blurred a line the law keeps distinct.
In his submission, he accused the authority of attempting "to collapse the distinction between legal advice and investigative or administrative functions." He also said legal billing information is not automatically privileged just because it relates to legal services, and he urged the commissioner's office to scrutinize the claims closely rather than accept blanket assertions.
The authority pushed back. It maintained that once a solicitor-client relationship exists, privilege covers the whole continuum of communications in which legal advice is sought and given, and pointed to courts applying privilege to lawyers retained to investigate and then advise. On the invoices, it argued that disclosing the itemized entries could expose the substance of that advice.
Why every page stayed confidential
Barker found that all of the disputed records were protected. She was not persuaded that the external lawyer had acted only as an investigator, noting that courts have long accepted that "legal advice includes ascertaining or investigating the facts upon which the advice is based." The emails and their attachments, she concluded, were confidential communications made to seek or give legal advice.
The invoices met the same result. Barker noted that legal-fee information is presumptively privileged, and that the burden fell on the former employee to show there was no reasonable possibility disclosure would expose privileged communications. He offered no authorities to rebut that presumption, she found, so the invoices stayed protected as well.
She also rejected the idea that portions could be carved out and released, finding a real risk that even partial disclosure would let him infer the legal advice given. Having concluded the privilege claim held across all 334 pages, she confirmed the refusal and declined to decide whether a separate privacy exemption also applied.
See Provincial Health Services Authority (Re), 2026 BCIPC 79
