Information & Ethics committee  I can answer that question. The withheld service period that is usually imposed on individuals is five years from the date of the incident. We take administrative investigations very seriously. We know there's a charter right to travel. Canadians have a charter right to travel,

Information & Ethics committee  You would have to ask the RCMP that. It's a matter of whether they have the capacity to investigate single identity thefts.

Information & Ethics committee  That would be the case for the 70 that the director general Lu Fernandes referred to.

Information & Ethics committee  Forgery is quite common.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. During investigations we do.

Information & Ethics committee  We would.

Information & Ethics committee  From our perspective, one of the big investigative tools we use is facial recognition. When someone applies for a passport, the minute they apply for a passport their picture is run against all the pictures we have in our database. That's probably the first line of defence, if yo

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. In many cases, they have stolen the actual documents of an individual, be it a citizenship paper, a birth certificate, or a health card. They've actually stolen those documents and used them to apply for a passport.

Information & Ethics committee  What happens in that process is that the application is stopped at the time the person applies, and we commence an investigation of the individual. The individual is advised that he or she is under investigation and is notified by a letter advising them that we cannot proceed wit

Information & Ethics committee  No, actually they are not advised, because the difficulty we have is that we don't know exactly how the documents were stolen. We don't know how the individual came into being in possession of those documents. In fact we don't know if the documents were linked to a friend of this