The Old Brewery Mission, the Old Brewery Mission Foundation and the Patricia Mackenzie Pavilion (collectively referred to as the “Mission”) is committed to protecting the privacy of people whose personal information is collected and held by the Mission. We recognize our responsibility to be transparent and accountable in how we use the personal information we have on our donors, partners, volunteers, and the people we serve.
During the course of various Mission activities, we collect, use and disclose a variety of personal information.
Accountability
The Mission is responsible for all personal information under its custody or control.
What is personal information?
Personal information is any information that can be used to distinguish, identify or contact a specific individual. Exceptions to this are business contact information and publicly available information. Personal information does not include the name, title, business, address, telephone number or other contact information of an individual at a place of business, which can be collected, used or disclosed without consent.
Why does the Mission collect, use or disclose personal information?
We collect, use or disclose personal information to issue tax receipts to donors, deliver services to clients and members of the public, to keep you informed and up-to-date on our activities including programs, services, special events, funding needs, opportunities to volunteer or to give. We do not rent, sell or trade our mailing lists.
Some of the Mission’s programs are operated in collaboration with the Quebec Government Ministry of Health Services (Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux), the City of Montreal and various non-profit organizations. Some information relating to those programs may be shared with those public bodies as may be necessary or appropriate under the service provider arrangements.
In general, the Mission restricts its collection of personal information, the internal distribution of personal information, and its external sharing of personal information, to the limited extent reasonably necessary for its purposes and programs. The Mission is also entitled to collect, use and disclose personal information as required or permitted by applicable law.
Consent
Generally, your knowledge and consent are required before we collect or disclose your personal information. This consent may be implicit or explicit, depending on the sensitivity of the circumstances.
Implicit and “deemed” consent
Implicit consent exists when the information is provided voluntarily and the purpose would be obvious to a reasonable person. For example, when you make a donation to us, you provide identifiable information in order to receive a tax receipt. We will assume you have “deemed” consent for us to use your personal information, and we will issue you a tax receipt.
In addition to issuing tax receipts, this information may be used to keep you informed about Mission activities including programs, services, special events, funding needs, opportunities to volunteer or to give. We routinely offer you the opportunity to opt not to have your information used for these purposes, and you will always be given the option to withdraw your consent and opt not to receive this type of material from us.
Explicit consent
Explicit consent means that the Mission will obtain written or oral consent from you before collecting, using or disclosing the information. This is usually in the case of more sensitive information. For example, we will obtain written consent from people who take part in our programs. To provide quality support services, sensitive information including personal health information may be asked. This may include diagnosis, relevant health history and physician’s name. Subject to PIPA, this information is kept confidential, will not be shared with anyone and will only be used for the stated purpose of providing quality support services. Some de-identified data are sent to the federal government through the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS). We will destroy, erase or make anonymous personal information that we no longer need.
What about spam?
You will not receive marketing e-mail from us unless you have consented to receive it. From time to time we may use e-mail as a way to keep in touch with you. However, we do not send unsolicited marketing e-mail except in compliance with applicable law.
If you agree to receive e-mail communications from us, every e-mail message we send to you will include an e-mail address to which you can respond. If at any time you decide you do not want to receive e-mail from us, simply let us know and we will remove your name and e-mail address from our database. We will do the same with your mailing address and telephone number on request.
How does the Mission protect your personal information?
We are committed to protecting personal information by ensuring appropriate security safeguards are in place.
Safeguards will vary depending on the sensitivity of the information and may include measures such as password-protecting electronic documents, locking paper files and ensuring only authorized personnel have access to certain documents.
We will strive to keep your personal information as accurate and up-to-date as necessary.
Subject to other legal requirements to retain information, this means that the Mission retains personal information only as long as our relationship with you is being maintained and cultivated or if necessary for statistical purposes.
Privacy and our website
Our website’s operating system may automatically record some general information about your visit, such as:
- The Internet domain for your Internet service provider, and the IP address of the computer accessing the website.
- The type of browser (such as ‘Safari’ or ‘Internet Explorer’) you are using.
- The date and time you visit our site and the web pages that you visit on our site.
- The web address of the previous website you were visiting, if you linked to us from another website.
We may also use cookies to determine the usefulness of our website information to our users and in helping you find the information you need.
We use this information for statistical analysis only, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. We may disclose this non-personal information to third parties such as suppliers or partners and/or use it for auditing purposes. This tracking does not record personal information about individuals or link this information to any personal data collected.
If you prefer not to receive cookies while browsing our website, you can set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies and refuse the cookie when your browser alerts you to its presence. You can also refuse all cookies by turning them off in your browser but you may not be able to take full advantage of our website if you do so.
When you leave our website
This policy discloses the privacy practices in use for the Mission website. However, our site contains links to other sites. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy and security policies of the new site. The Mission is not responsible for the contents of any linked website, any link contained in a linked website or any changes or updates to such websites. The inclusion of any link does not mean that the Mission endorses that website.
We encourage you to read the privacy statements of all websites you visit, especially if they request any personal information from you.
Your right to access your personal information
Upon written request, you have a right to see and ask for corrections to your personal information that we have on file. We will normally respond to your request within 30 days. You can make a request by contacting us. The contact information is listed below.
Questions and Complaints
If you have any questions or concerns, if you wish to exercise your rights or if you wish to file a privacy complaint, please contact the Privacy Officer as follows:
Antonietta Morra
Director of Human Resources
The Old Brewery Mission will investigate all complaints and take appropriate action as a result of any investigation.
