[1] He was best known as the Parliament Hill bureau chief of CTV News, and host of the political talk show Question Period, from 1968 to 1985.
[2] Colleague Charles Lynch described Phillips as the best writer ever to grace the Parliamentary Press Gallery, stating that he was "capable of prose that came close to poetry".
[6] In 1990 he was named as Privacy Commissioner of Canada;[7] although the Liberal caucus in both the House of Commons and the Senate tried to hold up the appointment on the grounds that Phillips was too close to Mulroney to credibly serve in a non-partisan watchdog role,[8] he was ultimately approved in 1991.
[9] He held the position until his retirement in 2000, having received a two-year extension to his term by Prime Minister Jean Chretien, approved unanimously by the House of Commons and the Senate.
During this time he succeeded in persuading Parliament to pass the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which extended Canadians' privacy rights to the private sector.