Privacy Policy
How Stanhope Simpson Insurance Ltd. collects, uses, discloses and protects your personal information, under the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
PIPEDA sets requirements and restrictions on how businesses handle the personal information of their clients — specifically, the information we may obtain in the course of acting as your insurance broker.
What Personal Information We Hold
Depending on the type of insurance product we provide to you, the type of personal information we may hold could include, but is not limited to:
- Name, address, and phone number.
- Date of birth, family and marital status.
- Credit rating and payment records.
- Prior insurance experience including claims history.
- Driver’s license number, vehicle identification number (VIN), and driving record.
- Banking and credit card information.
- Medical and health information.
- Employment and income information.
We use or disclose such information only to/for the Identified Purposes described below.
We limit the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information to only what is necessary to provide you with the insurance protection that you have requested or in the case of a claim, to provide you with the compensation to which you are entitled. In order to do this, we collect, use, and disclose your personal information for the following purposes (our Identified Purposes):
- Offering and providing insurance products and services to you.
- Establishing and maintaining communications with you.
- Verifying your personal information with government agencies, brokers/agents, other insurers, insurance reporting agencies, and credit bureaus.
- Assessing and underwriting risks on a prudent basis.
- Facilitating your payment of premiums.
- Processing and paying claims.
- Complying with the law or requests of law enforcement agencies or regulators.
To collect, use, or disclose your personal information we require your consent.
For existing clients who have already provided personal information we have accepted this information as implied consent to use this information for our Identified Purposes. As we go forward, you may be asked to provide written consent authorizing the use of personal information for our Identified Purposes.
We are committed to protecting your privacy. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect your personal information from unauthorized access.
Should you have any questions regarding our privacy policy or procedures, please feel free to give Gerald Ward a call:
Gerald Ward, CIP
Privacy Compliance Officer
Direct Dial: (902) 454-7198, extension 235
Email: gward@stanhopesimpson.com
Your Right to See and Correct Your Information
You may ask us what personal information we hold about you, how it has been used, and to whom it has been disclosed. Federal privacy law requires us to respond within thirty days of receiving your request, and if we need more time we must tell you so in writing within that first thirty days, along with the reason and the new deadline. If we cannot give you access, we will explain why and tell you how to challenge that decision.
If you find something inaccurate or incomplete, tell us and we will correct it. Where the correction affects information we have already passed to an insurer, we will pass the correction along as well.
How Long We Keep It
We keep personal information only as long as it is needed for the purposes set out above, or as long as we are required to keep it by law, by our regulator, or by the insurers and sureties we place business with. Insurance and surety files are typically retained for a period after a policy or bond ends, because claims and disputes can surface long after coverage has expired. When information is no longer needed for any of those purposes, it is destroyed, erased or de-identified.
If There Is a Privacy Breach
Federal law requires us to keep a record of every breach of our security safeguards, whether or not it is serious, and to keep those records for twenty-four months. Where a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you — the law lists identity theft, financial loss, damage to your credit record, humiliation and damage to reputation or relationships among the possibilities — we are required to report it to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and to notify you as soon as feasible. We will also notify anyone else who is in a position to reduce the risk of harm to you, such as your insurer or a payment processor.
Questions, Concerns and Complaints
Start with our Privacy Compliance Officer. Gerald Ward, CIP can be reached directly at (902) 454-7198, extension 235, or at gward@stanhopesimpson.com. Our main line is (902) 454-8641 and our office is at 3845 Joseph Howe Drive, Suite 300, Halifax, NS B3L 4H9.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can bring a complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at 1-800-282-1376. Note that the Commissioner asks you to raise the issue with us first — if you have not done that, the office may decline to take the complaint.
See also our Accessibility Statement, which covers requesting this information in another format.
Last reviewed August 2026. This policy reflects the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which is the private-sector privacy law that applies to us in Nova Scotia. Federal privacy legislation is currently under review in Parliament, and we will update this page if the law changes.