Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, filed an application with the Federal Court on August 28, 2026, asking it to order Google to de-list a set of search results tied to an individual's name. The results in question link to news articles about a criminal charge that was laid, then stayed by the Crown shortly afterward. Google has spent a year declining to comply with the Commissioner's 2025 recommendation and says the case raises unresolved freedom-of-expression questions it welcomes a court's attention to.
A Nine-Year Road to One Filing
The case began with a 2017 complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC). Google argued its search engine fell outside Canada's private-sector privacy statute, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), because search results qualify as journalistic content. The OPC took that jurisdictional question to the Federal Court in 2018; the Court ruled against Google in 2021, and the Federal Court of Appeal affirmed in Google LLC v. Canada (Privacy Commissioner), 2023 FCA 200, holding that Google Search does not act "solely for journalistic purposes" and cannot claim the exemption. Dufresne called the ruling a step that "brings clarity to privacy protections" for Canadians searching their own names.
With jurisdiction settled, the OPC investigated the underlying complaint and published PIPEDA Findings #2025-002 on August 27, 2025. It concluded that continuing to surface the articles for name-based searches breached subsection 5(3) of PIPEDA — the requirement that data practices serve purposes "a reasonable person would consider appropriate" — because the risk of serious harm to the complainant's safety and dignity outweighed the public interest in name-searchability specifically. Google declined to act. A year later, lacking any power to compel compliance itself, the Commissioner did the only thing PIPEDA lets it do: ask a court.
What Is Actually Being Requested
The remedy on the table is narrower than "right to be forgotten" headlines suggest. The OPC is not asking Google to delete the underlying articles, block them from other search terms, or scrub them from the open web. The request is to de-index them from results returned when a person searches the complainant's specific name — the articles stay live, indexable, and discoverable through any other query. That distinction matters: it's the difference between erasing a public record and un-indexing one narrow retrieval path to it, and it tracks the same limiting principle the EU's Court of Justice used in Google Spain (2014), the case that coined "right to be forgotten" in the first place.
Steelmanning the Case for De-Listing
The Commissioner's underlying position deserves to be stated on its strongest terms before it's argued against. The complainant here was charged, then had that charge stayed by the Crown within months — meaning the record that persists in top search results is, functionally, an accusation with no adjudicated finding behind it, surfaced every time an employer, landlord, or acquaintance types a name into Google. PIPEDA's accuracy and appropriate-purpose principles exist precisely to stop stale, incomplete, or prejudicial personal data from circulating indefinitely just because it was once true that a charge existed. Refusing any accommodation for that harm, on the theory that anything a newspaper once published must stay permanently and universally indexed, is its own kind of category error — it treats "searchable by name" as inseparable from "exists," when the two are not the same thing.
Where the Free-Expression Concern Bites
Google's objection isn't frivolous either. PIPEDA has no built-in newsworthiness or public-interest defense comparable to defamation law's, and de-listing regimes elsewhere have proven genuinely hard to keep narrow: the EU's version, built out under GDPR case law, has generated years of disputes over scope-creep — public figures seeking to de-index legitimate reporting on their conduct, and search engines making thousands of ad hoc judgment calls with limited transparency, a dynamic EFF has flagged repeatedly in warning that platform-liability regimes tend to over-remove rather than under-remove once the legal risk of not complying outweighs the risk of complying too broadly. A regime where a privacy regulator's unilateral factual finding could bind a search engine's indexing decisions — with no independent judicial balancing test written into the statute — is a real slippery-slope concern, not a manufactured one.
Why the Structure Here Is the Right Answer
That concern is exactly what this case's procedural posture answers. Dufresne cannot order Google to do anything; PIPEDA gives the OPC investigative and recommendation power only, forcing it into Federal Court to seek an enforceable order — precisely the independent judicial check that critics of takedown regimes usually say is missing. Google gets to litigate the freedom-of-expression question on the merits, the Court weighs the specific facts rather than rubber-stamping a regulator's finding, and any resulting order applies to one name-search pairing rather than establishing a general takedown obligation. That's a meaningfully different model than a regulator or platform making irreversible removal calls at scale under legal duress — it's closer to how courts already adjudicate defamation and privacy torts case by case.
The risk to watch isn't this case — a narrow, court-adjudicated, name-specific de-listing request is a proportionate ask against a search engine that captures roughly 86% of Canadian queries. The risk is what comes after, if Parliament reads a Federal Court win here as license to legislate a broader, regulator-administered de-listing power modeled on the EU's without the same judicial guardrail. Canada should let this precedent set the ceiling, not the floor: courts, not commissioners, should keep deciding when name-search de-listing is warranted.