OTTAWA—NDP officials misused voters list information supplied by Elections Canada to mail out Christmas cards, leader Jagmeet Singh’s office says.

Singh’s office sent Christmas cards to an unspecified number of people including parliamentary reporters, several of which arrived at personal home addresses which had not been given to the party.

The Star asked questions of Singh’s office on the weekend, and senior officials expressed surprise at the use of private personal addresses.

On Tuesday, Singh’s chief of staff Jennifer Howard wrote to the Star to confirm the addresses used were drawn from Elections Canada information and apologized, saying “we would never want anyone to be worried about the security of their home address information.”

Singh’s spokesman George Soule said Tuesday that the leader’s office gave a list of card recipients — many of which would have come from previous lists — to a “junior staffer” to update, and to take care of the mail-out. In the transfer, Soule said, some work addresses inexplicably “dropped off the list.”

The staffer in Singh’s office then contacted a friend who works at the party’s headquarter office and asked if they had any addresses to fill in the blanks, according to Soule.

The second NDP employee, whom Soule described also as a junior staffer, then gave out information supplied to the party by Elections Canada on voters’ home addresses.

“Obviously this shouldn’t have happened,” said Soule, who said neither employee had consulted with any senior staffers, and had they done so they would have been told it was not an appropriate use of the information.

He said the NDP has destroyed that list of card recipients and their personal addresses so “it cannot and will not happen any more.”

Soule could not say how many people were affected by the release of the information. But he said the party contacted Elections Canada to “be honest about this use of the data” and to ask for guidance on next steps.

Elections Canada spokesperson Natasha Gauthier told the Star that the agency’s guidelines say registered parties and MPs “are authorized to use the lists to communicate with electors, including for the purposes of soliciting contributions and recruiting party members.”

The NDP’s use of the information appears to fall in that category, according to the elections law enforcement office.

Myriam Cossette, a spokesperson for the Commissioner of Canada Elections told the Star, that there is “no prohibition against the use of the list of electors by registered parties to send greeting cards to electors, including outside an election period.”

Cossette said: “Sending holiday greeting cards is a manner of communicating with electors. In fact, it is a common practice for parties to distribute such material.”

Nevertheless, the NDP was sheepish about the slip-up.

“Still, we are reviewing our practices and this won’t happen again. I would like to add my apology to Jennifer’s,” Soule said after Cossette said it didn’t breach the law.

“I know how important the security of reporter’s information is, given the important work that you do.”

Nathalie Gauthier, of Elections Canada, said only the Commissioner of Canada Elections has a mandate to investigate potential instances of non-compliance with the Elections Act.

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Using voters’ personal information “in an unauthorized manner is a criminal offence” under the Canada Elections Act, and subject to a fine of $10,000, imprisonment for up to one year or both.

Elections Canada recommends political parties take precautions to protect the security and confidentiality of voters’ personal information, including training staff, limiting access to information to a “need to know” basis, and based on the reliability status of employees having access to the information. It also urges technical measures like strong passwords, audit trails, encryption, firewalls and other technical security safeguards to minimize the risk of unauthorized individuals accessing personal information, and restricted access to areas where information is stored.

Gauthier said that eligible and registered parties that receive voters’ lists are now required by law to establish privacy policies to protect personal information and to make those policies public on their websites; and to inform Elections Canada of those policies.

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