Justice committee  I think, Mr. Murphy, your example points out the problematic aspect of this. If you find somebody's wallet on the ground, you haven't committed theft. If you lift the wallet up and open it up and look at the information, have you committed theft of the information? I don't know,

Justice committee  --didn't involve--

Justice committee  I'm not sure that's conversion in the law.

Justice committee  Well, conversion involves a rather complicated form of taking. Finding something is not taking it. You pick it up off the ground, you return it to the person, you've committed no criminal offence, you've committed no civil tort. You look at the information. Is that a criminal o

Justice committee  I would suggest, Mr. Chair, that the scope of the bill is addressing a particular kind of activity. False pretense, as in fraud, is one of kind of activity, and theft is something else. And I wouldn't have thought that theft was the kind of activity that was within the scope of t

Justice committee  I really can't see how, Mr. Murphy. First of all, there's no fraud or false pretenses involved in the transfer of the information, and secondly, the transfer doesn't involve the purpose of using it for fraud or personation. So I can't really conceive of an innocent, legitimate ex

Justice committee  I can only agree with Mr. Rajotte. The voluntary collection of information by businesses is simply not.... This activity is not involved in any way, but they are governed in their collection of information by PIPEDA. Mr. Rajotte is asking that some of the concerns he has raised a

Justice committee  There is a broader identity theft initiative involving Industry and some other departments, which includes things like consumer information. You're quite right, Mr. Thompson. There are a lot of things that people can do to protect themselves, and probably need to know to protect

Justice committee  If you turn that card in at the hotel, you're giving them something from which that credit card information can be pulled off. I just found that out myself. Now I destroy that plastic card. I take it with me, and when I get it home I cut it up. I have a shredder at home, and I

Justice committee  To further comment, the concept of theft of information, as Ms. Klineberg noted earlier, is a somewhat difficult one, because the law has not generally regarded information as having value by itself. What we've been focusing on in terms of the government's identity theft initia

Justice committee  Mr. Petit, it is not covered under this bill, as it's focused, or probably not, because it deals with using some sort of fraud or false pretenses to obtain the information that they then create the identity from. I would assume that in the cases you're talking about, they probabl

Justice committee  Mr. Chairman, no. This bill deals with pretexting, and that's one particular kind of activity involved in the overall panoply of activities that are what we call identity theft. Perhaps I'll ask Ms. Klineberg to address the particular issue of credit cards. There are a number o

Justice committee  The fraud offence is quite broad-based and covers a great deal of ground. It's the most commonly used offence whenever any kind of fraudulent activity is involved. There are a number of more specific offences in the Criminal Code that deal with activity of a fraudulent nature, bu

Justice committee  The false pretense offence now is a little bit more focused on false pretense to obtain some particular good or service--obtaining credit by a false pretense. There are a number of subsections, but obtains credit, loans, personal property.... It's fairly focused on a false preten

Justice committee  The existing false pretenses offence is, again, a fairly common offence where what the false pretense is used to obtain is the particular kind of target that the current false pretenses offence sets out--credit, loans, that sort of thing. In those situations it's quite frequently