Justice committee  Well, if all you've got is that the person has a briefcase with one person's information in it, then presumably if that's all there was, perhaps you shouldn't be getting a conviction for possession of identity information in circumstances giving rise to the intent that you might use it.

Justice committee  The PIPEDA definition is intended as a privacy protection and covers information that is simply about someone. It could be information about their shopping preferences or whatever. What we're dealing with here is a more specific focus on information that actually identifies the person, the sort of information that could be used to then personate them or commit fraud using their identity information.

Justice committee  This does not require that that public officer be designated for the purposes of section 25.1. There is a definition of public officer in section 2 of the code. It includes: (a) an officer of customs or excise, (b) an officer of the Canadian Forces, (c) an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and (d) any officer while the officer is engaged in enforcing the laws of Canada relating to revenue, customs, excise, trade or navigation; Now, most of these people are actually going to have peace officer status.

Justice committee  Well, they have to be an officer to be a public officer, and they have to have law enforcement responsibilities.

Justice committee  In Afghanistan, this legislation doesn't cover that.

Justice committee  Most of the documents that an undercover law enforcement officer would use are not produced in-house by the police force. They're produced by the same people who issue the genuine documents. The driver's licence, or whatever documentation is required for an officer's covert identity, is produced usually by the third-party private manufacturers who do this documentation either for government or private entities that are issuing documents.

Justice committee  --by government for the use of an officer's covert identity--is protected insofar as they're not committing forgery in doing that. They're providing a document to a government agency that's requesting it and they're doing so in good faith.

Justice committee  The definition you find here is intended to bring this definition in line with the passport order, and this is how a passport order defines passport. Visas and so on are attached to passports.

Justice committee  Well, it would certainly be enough to trigger a further investigation. The cards themselves aren't covered by this legislation, although this legislation deals with it if they have the kind of equipment used to produce cards. It deals with instruments for general forgery purposes.

Justice committee  Yes. There is a specific definition in section 321--

Justice committee  --that makes it clear that it includes all of those kinds of cards used to draw financial resources.

Justice committee  The housebreaking tools offence is a question of simple possession, so it is qualified by the “without lawful excuse”, the general defence. In this case, it's quite specific to possession of housebreaking tools under certain circumstances, for example, out at night near somebody else's house as opposed to in your--

Justice committee  Sure. What this requires is that the possession be for the purpose of using it for an offence that involves fraud or deception, or passing on to someone else who will do that. If somebody is found in possession of identity information relating to multiple people, and that's a very common scenario, that would certainly be a circumstance that could give rise to the reasonable inference that they intended to use it for a fraudulent or deceptive offence.

Justice committee  Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. The primary focus of Mr. Rajotte's bill was on what's called “pretexting”, a particular means of gathering identity information for the purposes of particular offences that were spelled out in the bill. Bill C-27 goes well beyond that in terms of the means that might be used to gather the identity information.

Justice committee  The bill also makes the obtaining of the identify information an offence only if you either intend to use that for a further offence that involves fraud or deception or you're passing it on to someone else who you know or believe is reckless as to whether or not they're going to use it for that purpose.