Page: 11 the personal communications and documents of employees that are stored in paper form in their government-owned filing cabinets and desks and those that are stored in electronic form in their government-owned computer systems. [37] It can be confidently predicted that any government employee who works in an office setting will have stored, somewhere in that office, documents that have nothing whatsoever to do with his or her job, but which are purely personal in nature. Such documents can range from the most intimately personal documents (such as medical records) to the most mundane (such as a list of household chores). It cannot be suggested that employees of an institution governed by freedom of information legislation are themselves subject to that legislation in respect of any piece of personal material they happen to have in their offices at any given time. That is clearly not contemplated as being within the intent and purpose of the legislation. [38] The question then is whether information stored electronically should be treated any differently. I do not see any rational basis for making such a distinction. [39] There is, however, one difference in how the employer might treat electronic records somewhat differently and that relates to the security concerns posed by employees’ use of email and the internet while at work. Understandably, employers who allow employees to use their electronic servers for personal matters will typically have policies to ensure that these electronic media are not being used in a manner that is inappropriate or illegal or that compromises the security of the entire system. [40] In this case, the City of Ottawa had a Responsible Computing Policy which addressed, among other things, the personal use of IT services and assets by its employees. There were under stable restrictions on such use, none of which arise in this case. In order to ensure compliance with the policy, and for network management reasons, the City stipulated that it had the right to access its IT assets and information at any time and that monitoring may be done at any time without notice and without the knowledge of the individual users. Employees were therefore warned that if they had privacy concerns they should refrain from using the City’s IT services to store or transmit personal-use information. [41] It was the City’s policy with respect to management of its IT services that led the Arbitrator to find that the personal emails of Mr. O’Connor were actually in the custody of the City. The Arbitrator held that the policy meant the City: (1) had physical possession and the right to possession of the emails; and (2) the City had the authority to regulate the use and disposal of the records on its system. In my view, those factors are not determinative of control given the purpose for which the City retained the right to monitor its system, as contrasted to the underlying purpose of freedom of information legislation. [42] Employers from time to time may also need to access a filing cabinet containing an employee’s personal files. That does not make the personal files of the employee subject to disclosure to the general public on the basis that the employer has some measure of control over them. The nature of electronically stored files makes the need for monitoring more pressing and the actual monitoring more frequent, but it does not change the nature of the documents, nor the nature