Privacy claims have gone way too far

By MEL ROTHENBURGER/ The Armchair Mayor

I read with interest this week that the Amalgamated Transit Union in Gatineau wants the transit service there to ban passengers from taking videos of bus drivers.

It is, says the union, an invasion of privacy.

A video taken by a passenger shows a driver getting some paperwork done while driving his bus. For almost a full minute he shuffles through his papers, scribbles on them and finally puts them aside.

For much of that time, his hands are barely on the steering wheel, or not at all.

“I think that the person who makes the video, if they don’t like the way the driver’s doing that they should go tell the driver. Not put that on TV,” said union president Felix Gendron.

Well, gosh, pity the poor bus driver. The union would, no doubt, be of the view he should get the Employee of the Month award and be commended for multi-tasking, not criticized and having it watched by 132,000 people on YouTube.

After all, it’s not as though the guy was texting or doing crossword puzzles.

But, seriously, this issue of privacy has been taken a few steps too far. Really, if a bus driver needs to stop to heed the call of nature, he deserves privacy; when he’s driving his bus with passengers depending on him for their safety, I submit the public has a vested interest in what he’s doing.

I suppose, taken in context, the Gatineau bus driver is a petty offender. In Halifax, a bus driver was accused of repeatedly ramming a courier van after it parked illegally at a bus stop.

The transit union, the same one that represents drivers in Gatineau, denied it ever happened. But then, nobody had a video camera to record it.

Bus drivers, though they receive their share of public ridicule, are angels compared to the guys who drive those big trains. Like the one who fell asleep while in control of a Japanese bullet train rocketing along at 170 mph with 800 passengers aboard.

Meanwhile, an air traffic controller in Washington D.C. dosed off while on duty. A video of that would have gone viral.

There are, to be sure, genuine invasions of privacy that should not be tolerated. When the News of the World hacks into the private voicemail of rape victims, that is an unacceptable invasion of privacy.

When Sarah Palin’s private emails are published on the Internet, that’s an invasion of privacy.

Sometimes, the camera can be used for intimidation rather than information. One wonders, for example, if all the video-taping being done at the Rocky Mountaineer protest the other night wasn’t an example of that.

And an argument can be made that video cameras on street corners that tape you just in case you do something you shouldn’t are an invasion of privacy, though it’s a position I don’t buy into.

Anyone with a smartphone can become an instant videographer these days, and there are some legitimate concerns about the implications of that for the average person’s privacy.

But when police put the boots to a suspect, or “hockey fans” riot in Vancouver, or “under-privileged” youth rampage in London, or a bus driver fills out forms instead of keeping his hands on the wheel —  I say, roll video.