David Harris Flaherty Scholarship
David Harris Flaherty served a six-year, non-renewable term as the first Information and Privacy Commissioner for the Province of British Columbia (1993-99).
Flaherty began his involvement with privacy issues as an assistant to Alan F. Westin at Columbia University in 1964. His first book was Privacy in Colonial New England (1972). In 1974 he started comparative public policy work in Europe and North America that led to a series of books, including Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, and the United States (1989). Flaherty has written or edited fourteen books.
He is an honors history graduate of McGill University (1962) and has an MA and PhD from Columbia University. His teaching career, from 1965 to 1993, included Princeton University, the University of Virginia and the University of Western Ontario, where he was Professor of History and Law from 1972 to 1999 and is now Professor Emeritus. He was the first director (1984-89) of its Centre for American Studies. He has held fellowships and scholarships at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and Georgetown Universities. In 1992-93 David Harris Flaherty was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Canada-US. Fulbright Scholar in Law. Flaherty was an Adjunct Professor in Political Science at the University of Victoria from 1999 to 2006.
Flaherty was President of Pacific Opera Victoria for four years from 2010-2014. He is also an Honorary Life Member of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.