Defendants Taryn Burnett, Gowlings give contradictory excuses for pulling Plaintiff's credit report

As indicated in this earlier blog post, defendant Taryn Burnett pulled the credit report of the opposing self-represented plaintiff without the plaintiff's knowledge or consent, and for no valid reason, constituting a serious privacy breach.

Since then, Burnett and her law firm Gowlings have given contradictory excuses for the credit report pull throughout two different forum processes with which the plaintiff is pursuing grievances - the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) which has thus far ruled on the preliminary matter of Gowlings' refused response, and the Law Society of Alberta. The moving target of Burnett/Gowlings' shifting excuses has delayed and frustrated the plaintiff's pursuit of justice through the forums' processes, and the plaintiff continues to deal with them.

The history of Burnett/Gowlings' privacy breach and the OIPC's order in the preliminary matter for Gowlings to respond to the plaintiff's PIPA request for her credit and financial information, which Gowlings had sought to refuse, can be read here and here. Since that order was made, Gowlings has stalled and stonewalled the plaintiff from obtaining the records and answers and given only minimal information.

Gowlings and Megan McMahon (who replaced Burnett when she was removed from the case) initially purported the credit report was pulled for their security for costs application, which they in fact lost when it was dismissed by the court in 2013. A security for costs application is not even a valid reason to pull an opposing party's credit report.

More recently, in August 2017, Burnett gave a completely different excuse to the Law Society, which she and Gowlings made no mention of to the plaintiff in their ongoing stonewalling. Not only does the plaintiff dispute the new excuse Burnett has conveniently come up with in the wake of the spotlight on this matter, Burnett gave no evidence for it.

If there was any confusion as to what McMahon originally admitted to the Law Society concerning her colleague Burnett's credit pull for the improper purpose of a security for costs application they were both involved in, this excerpt from a letter dated April 18, 2016 from Christine Blair, conduct counsel at the Law Society (repeating McMahon's written statement) should make it clear:

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In related matters, in the plaintiff's lawsuit against Taryn Burnett, Megan McMahon and Gowlings, both the appeal matter concerning the judge's refused recusal, and the amendments/striking applications have not yet been decided.

Updates will appear in future blog posts.

Post updated to add evidence.