Bill S-4 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create offences of identity theft, trafficking in identity information and unlawful possession or trafficking in certain government-issued identity documents, to clarify and expand certain offences related to identity theft and identity fraud, to exempt certain persons from liability for certain forgery offences, and to allow for an order that the offender make restitution to a victim of identity theft or identity fraud for the expenses associated with rehabilitating their identity.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

The more and more we listen to witnesses talk about identity theft, the more I, as an individual, and anybody in my constituency, I would say, should come to realize how important it is that they keep their own information very confidential and work to prevent this identity theft, which can be on a rampage all the more with all this new technology, I suppose.

This question is for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. In January 2010, Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), passed and added new Criminal Code offences that target the aspects of identity theft.

What impact did the introduction of these new offences have on affected organizations and government institutions in charge of law enforcement? Did that have any effect on them?

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Bill S-4 came into force in 2010, which added some new Criminal Code offences that target aspects of identity theft, some that were not, up until then, covered in the legislation. Has that had a positive impact at all on the ability to prosecute those kinds of things, that you're aware of? Now, the numbers obviously will continue to go up just because of volume.

Criminal Code

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today in support of Bill C-444, an act to amend the Criminal Code (personating peace officer or public officer).

The bill is basically identical to the previous bill, Bill C-576, which died on the order paper when the last Parliament ended.

Bill C-444 was reported without amendment from the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on April 24, 2013.

The bill deals with the existing offence of personating a peace officer or public officer. Specifically it would make it an aggravating factor on sentencing if the offence of personating a peace officer or public officer was committed for the purpose of facilitating another offence.

Prior to 2009, pretending to be a peace officer or public officer was a straightforward summary conviction offence. At that time it carried a maximum of six months in prison, a maximum fine of $5,000 or both.

In 2009, this government hybridized the offence and increased the penalty to a maximum of five years when prosecuted on indictment, in former Bill S-4, also known as the identity theft bill. That legislation came into force on January 8, 2010.

The maximum sentence of five years reflects the fact that the offence only requires that a person pretend to be a peace officer or public officer. It does not require that they have a specific malicious purpose for doing so or that they accomplish something malicious by doing so.

Some people may impersonate the police for the thrill of feeling powerful or for other relatively minor objectives, such as obtaining information or gaining access to a place. Simply pretending to be a peace officer or public officer so that others may believe that person is in fact one, without any other motive, is enough to result in a conviction. Such cases may still be dealt with by way of summary conviction proceedings, based on the Crown prosecutor's assessment of all the relevant circumstances.

However, the five-year maximum penalty enacted in 2010 ensures that law enforcement and Crown prosecutors have the tools to appropriately address serious incidents of this behaviour, preserving public confidence in our peace officers and public officers.

Police personation can be closely associated with other offences. It can, in fact, be used as a tool to make the commission of other offences easier. Because we live in a society where most citizens are trusting of the police, members of the public may acquiesce to the authority of someone they believe to be a police officer or a public officer. The exploitation of citizens' trust in the police demonstrated by this kind of situation is the most troubling form of offence. It is especially deserving of condemnation by sentencing courts, as well as by Parliament.

This is precisely the situation that Bill C-444 targets. Bill C-444 would make it a mandatory aggravating factor on sentencing for the crime of personating a peace officer or public officer if the offence was committed for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence. It is frightening even to imagine how people could be influenced to comply with directions or the assertion of authority by someone they believed to be a police officer.

We are taught from our earliest interactions with our parents and teachers that police officers are safe persons we can rely on, especially in difficult or dangerous situations. It is thus not surprising that the vast majority of Canadians instinctively respect police officers' authority and follow their instructions, as we rightfully believe they are acting to keep us safe.

When criminals take advantage of this trust to defraud us or worse, that bond is jeopardized. This not only causes a great deal of anguish for individual survivors of these offences but also acts to make it more difficult for police officers or public officers to do their jobs effectively and keep our communities safe. Fortunately this is a rare occurrence, but its extreme seriousness can justify express condemnation in the Criminal Code.

It is also important to recall that in determining a fit sentence, the court must in all cases take into account all relevant aggravating and mitigating factors. Paragraph 718.2(a) of the Criminal Code describes a number of aggravating factors that apply to all offences. These include, for instance, evidence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused a position of trust or authority in relation to the victim. However in addition to these factors that are specifically listed, the sentencing court always retains discretion to determine if additional circumstances revealed by the evidence are aggravating or mitigating factors that should affect the sentence.

It is already the case in our law that a sentencing judge can take into account the aggravating nature of this form of police personation. What Bill C-444 would do is essentially codify this practice in the context of the criminal law.

Bill C-444 merits support because it addresses a truly horrific form of criminality which has so many negative consequences on the public at large, on the ability of the police to carry out their functions, and especially on any individuals whose trust in public institutions and authorities was used against them to facilitate their victimization. There have been a number of incidents of this form of conduct reported in the papers in the last few years. Just this past April it appeared that at least two more incidents of personating peace officers have occurred.

In Calgary there are recent media reports that a man driving a silver sedan with unauthorized red and blue lights pulled over two vehicles, scaring the innocent drivers. Fortunately, the victims realized that something was not right about the impostor and got in contact with the real authorities to report the situation. Luckily, nobody was harmed. However, this act has surely shaken Canadians' trust and their belief in who is or is not a police officer.

On the east coast, the Halifax Chronicle Herald reported criminals had been personating local police officers via telephone in order to fraudulently solicit donations for a bogus charity. The scam artists claimed that they were police officers fundraising to help combat youth suicide. This disgraceful conduct not only preys on generous citizens, but also makes it more difficult for real officers to give back to their communities through legitimate fundraising activities, which is a long-standing tradition in police services across our country.

Of course, there was the tragic case in the sponsoring member's riding, which saw a devastating abduction and sexual assault of a teenage girl near Penhold, Alberta. This incident clearly influenced the proponent's decision to bring this legislation forward.

During the most recent committee study of the bill, members heard the courageous testimony of the survivor of that offence as well as that of her mother. I applaud the immense strength of that young woman's courage to travel to Ottawa and assist the committee by sharing her story with members of Parliament as well as with all Canadians. She rightly explained to the committee that there should never be shame or stigma in reporting or speaking out against sexual violence.

By passing this legislation we would send a clear message that the courts must give serious weight during sentencing to the enduring harm that is caused when criminals personate police officers or public officers for the purpose of committing other criminal acts, including sexual assault and kidnapping.

All Canadians should be concerned about these cases and should be encouraged to take the appropriate steps to avoid being duped by this very deceptive form of criminality. In particular, citizens should continue to trust the police but they should also recognize that criminals are not above exploiting their trust.

It is a difficult balance to achieve. The exercise of a bit of caution is a good thing. It is reasonable to ask to see the badges of individuals who appears to be police officers, especially if being requested to go with them or to allow them to enter the premises, or if they appear to be soliciting donations. This kind of verification process must be done respectfully and cautiously. If an impostor flees when asked for identification, immediately call 911, report the incident and attempt to provide an accurate description of the person and any associated vehicle while the encounter is still fresh in memory.

We as parliamentarians can help educate and inform Canadians about these risks, which many may be unaware of. In terms of Bill C-444, we can also vote to support this legislation and express our unified condemnation of those who would use our best natures as citizens against us.

I hope all members will join me in supporting this worthwhile legislation.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

When you began your testimony, Member Dreeshen, you mentioned specifically that this week is the correct week to bring this bill forward to this committee, obviously because this is a week for remembering and becoming more aware of the issues that victims face, so I'd like to focus my questioning specifically on victims.

Section 130 of the Criminal Code is a hybrid offence and it's punishable by a maximum of five years' imprisonment on indictment. Prior to the enactment by the Conservative government in 2009 of Bill S-4 for identity theft and related misconduct, it was a straight summary conviction offence punishable by a maximum of six months' imprisonment.

Obviously your work here on Bill C-444 is a little different from Bill S-4, but do you think that both these bills will ensure that victims are better protected in our country? How do you think that will work?

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you.

I guess one of the things that one should recognize is that in the discussions at that particular point in time, when it occurred, it was under the old regime, which was six months. Certainly taking a look at that, I have no question that this being the same as using a gun in order to commit a crime certainly was woefully inadequate. Taking it to the five years, which it is, based on what had happened with Bill S-4, certainly does change the dynamics of that, but again, we're still leaving that to the discretion of the courts.

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be here today to participate in the debate on Bill C-444, which has to do with personating a peace officer or public officer.

This bill is nearly identical to the former Bill C-576, which died on the order paper during the previous Parliament. Bill C-576 made it to second reading and was passed by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

The bill has to do with the existing offence of personating a peace officer or public officer. More specifically, it suggests that the fact that an individual personated a peace officer or public officer for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence should be considered an aggravating circumstance during sentencing. The only difference between the two bills is that the current bill also includes the term “public officer”.

Personating a peace officer or public officer is a hybrid offence punishable under indictment by a maximum of five years in prison. Before 2009, this offence was only a summary conviction offence. At the time, it was punishable by a maximum of six months in prison or a maximum fine of $5,000, or both. It was obviously not considered to be a very serious offence.

In 2009, our government changed this offence to a hybrid offence and increased the maximum prison term to five years in the former Bill S-4, the identity theft bill, which came into force on January 10, 2010.

The five-year maximum prison term takes into account the fact that the offence requires only that we establish that the accused personated a peace officer or public officer. There is no requirement that there be malicious intent to specifically do so or that something malicious be accomplished in doing so.

Some individuals may decide to personate a police officer, for example, simply to feel powerful or as a way to do something else that may or may not be serious, such as getting information or gaining access to a location. Personating a peace officer or a public officer so that others believe that one really is such an officer can, in itself, lead to a conviction. No other evidence is required.

In a few instances, personating a police officer or a public officer will be directly associated with other offences. It is a way to enable the commission of other crimes. Since most people in our society have faith in the police and in other public institutions, they may, because of that faith, submit to the authority of an individual they believe to be a peace officer or a public officer.

Cases where people's trust in police and public officers is abused are very troubling. They must be condemned by sentencing courts and by Parliament. Bill C-444 addresses these cases. The bill would require that personating a peace officer or a public officer for the purpose of committing another offence be considered by a court to be an aggravating circumstance for sentencing purposes.

We could think of many situations where someone would voluntarily get into a police officer's vehicle, or let an officer into their home, before realizing that this person actually means them harm. Such cases are rare, fortunately. However, they are extremely serious, which justifies including them specifically in the Criminal Code.

It is also important to recall that in determining a fit sentence, the court must in all cases take into account all relevant aggravating and mitigating factors. Paragraph 718.2(a) of the Criminal Code describes a number of aggravating factors that apply to all offences. These include, for instance, evidence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused a position of trust or authority in relation to the victim. But in addition to these factors which are specifically listed, the sentencing court always retains discretion to determine if additional circumstances revealed by the evidence are aggravating or mitigating factors that should affect the sentence.

It is already the case that a sentencing judge can take into account the aggravated nature of this form of police or public officer personation. What Bill C-444 does is essentially codify this practice in the text of the law.

Bill C-444 deserves serious consideration in this House because it addresses a truly horrific form of criminality which has so many negative consequences on the public at large, on the ability of police to carry out their functions, and especially on any individuals whose trust in public institutions and authorities was used against them to facilitate their victimization.

While this form of conduct continues to be rare in this country, there have been a number of incidents reported in the media in the last few years. One case involved drivers being stopped by a police impersonator and requested to pay immediately for an alleged speeding offence. Another case involved motorists who were followed after leaving a casino, and then pulled over and robbed of their winnings. There have also been profoundly disturbing cases involving police personation so as to get someone into a car to facilitate their kidnapping.

There was the tragic and devastating incident involving the kidnapping and sexual assault of a teenager in the riding of Red Deer, the riding of the member who is sponsoring this bill. No doubt, this incident is what prompted him to introduce this bill.

All Canadians should be aware that such things can happen and should be encouraged to be vigilant. Citizens should trust the police, but they should also recognize that criminals are not above exploiting that trust. It is a difficult balance to achieve. The exercise of a little bit of caution is a good thing. It is reasonable to ask to see the badge of someone who appears to be a police officer, especially if you are being asked to go with them or to allow them to enter your premises. This kind of verification process must be done respectfully and cautiously.

As Parliamentarians, we can help educate and inform Canadians about these risks. That is exactly what the debate on Bill C-444 is allowing us to do.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to address Bill C-444, the private member's bill put forward by the member for Red Deer, which seeks to increase penalties for offenders convicted of personating a peace officer for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence. I will be supporting the bill going to committee, and I thank the member for Red Deer for once again bringing this important issue to the attention of the House and to me personally in this regard.

The member for Red Deer has been engaged in this issue for some time, and his concern is as genuine as it is warranted. I share his concern and his outrage in this matter with respect to offenders who disguise themselves as police officers to facilitate their crimes, thereby undermining public trust in the police and other authorities. It is important that Parliament address this problem in as principled and effective way as possible.

Regrettably, while the principle underlying the private member's bill is important, the bill before us is unlikely to have the significant effect that the member himself seeks or that the House would seek. However laudable its intent, Bill C-444 emerges as yet another variation of a Conservative crime bill that attempts to deal with crime, as the member for Red Deer himself acknowledged, at the sentencing stage after the crime has been committed, after the investigation has been carried out and after the offender has been arrested, tried and convicted. In other words, after the very fact that it seeks to prevent and regrettably after it is already too late.

However to its credit, and this bears mention, it does not seek to attach mandatory minimums in the matter of sentencing. It does not seek to eliminate or circumscribe judicial discretion.

It has a laudable underlying objective. My concern is whether this particular legislation would seek the laudable objective that the member for Red Deer himself has in mind.

Accordingly, while I am prepared to send the bill to committee for further study, I expect that such further study may be less effectual than it might otherwise be. Therefore, I will use the remainder of my time to set forth certain considerations in respect of this contention. First, I will examine why the bill is unlikely to increase the length of prison terms for people convicted of personating a peace officer. Second, I will discuss why, even if it did lead to longer prison terms, it would not reduce the occurrence of this crime, which is the member's principal objective, with which I concur. Finally, I will explore other measures that might prove to be more effective and that will help underpin the very principle that underlines the bill.

As I said, Bill C-444 is not likely to have a major impact on the severity of sentences. To begin with, it should be noted that in cases of personation of a peace officer, Canada currently allows for sentences more severe than in many other jurisdictions. In 2009 the House unanimously passed Bill S-4, which established a five-year maximum prison term for personation as opposed to U.S. states like New York or Michigan, where the maximum is four years, or the United Kingdom, which allows only for a sentence of six months.

Canada's sentencing regime already takes this crime very seriously, and there is no reason to think that judges are overlooking important factors such as the purpose of the personation when handing down sentences. For example, in 2009 and 2010 a Winnipeg man dressed up as a police officer in order to gain access to crime scenes, without committing any further offence. He was sentenced to four and a half months. By contrast, in the case of the man who posed as an officer in the member's riding of Red Deer in order to kidnap and abuse a teenaged girl, the judge handed down a total sentence of 18 years, including the maximum sentence for personation permitted at the time.

Simply put, it appears that judges have been making appropriate use of their discretion in such cases. The additional guidance offered by Bill C-444 is therefore unlikely to result in penalties for personation that are more severe.

However, even assuming the bill were to result in longer sentences for personation of a peace officer for the purpose of committing another offence, it is unlikely that offenders would spend more time in jail as a consequence. While judges may generally issue concurrent or consecutive sentences as they see fit, sentences for offences that are part of the same criminal act tend to be served concurrently, and it is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a judge would issue a longer sentence for personation than for the offence that the personation was intended to facilitate.

In other words, if an offender receives an 18-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault, it does not much matter to him or her whether his or her simultaneous offence for personation is a year or two or five.

This bill would therefore be unlikely to achieve the member's legitimate objective of having people who personate peace officers spend more time behind bars.

Of course, I appreciate that the member's ultimate objective is not longer prison terms for people who commit this crime, but, rather, fewer personations of peace officers in the first place and that this is his principal objective, which I share.

This brings me to my second point, which is that the deterrent effect of longer prison terms has been repeatedly shown to be minimal. Therefore, even if a judge were to be moved by this legislation to issue a longer sentence for personation than he or she would otherwise have done and even in the unusual circumstance that such a sentence were served consecutive to the sentence for the related offence, there would still be no reason to believe that the occurrence of the crime of personation in Canada would be reduced.

As was pointed out by Michael Jackson of the Canadian Bar Association at the justice committee's hearing on Bill C-10:

The evidence is overwhelming...in every jurisdiction where it's been studied, that putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has no salutary effect upon public safety...

In fact, a research summary on the Public Safety Department's own website, which compiles 50 studies involving over 300,000 offenders, finds that, “To argue for expanding the use of imprisonment in order to deter criminal behaviour is without empirical support”.

That is a conclusion that has been reached time and again by studies in Canada and jurisdictions around the world.

For example, in 2010 a man used a police officer's costume to commit a home invasion and robbery in Toronto. Do we truly believe that he spent the night before consulting the Criminal Code, poring over the jurisprudence and parsing the sentencing guidelines and had the guidelines been different, would have chosen not to proceed or to forego the outfit? Or in the case of the 2000 tragic kidnapping and assault in Red Deer, the member's riding, is it reasonable to assume that an offender who was prepared to risk the substantial penalties for kidnapping and aggravating sexual assault would have been dissuaded by the prospect of a slightly longer prison term for personating a peace officer. I suspect not.

Increasing the length of sentences is manifestly a less effective way of combatting all crimes, personation included.

This brings me to the final part of my remarks, in which I will propose some alternative methods for minimizing the occurrence of personation of peace officers to begin with, which is the private member's bill's objective.

First, we should examine how offenders acquire authentic looking police attire and accessories. As the member for Red Deer noted in debate on the previous version of his bill, a wide array of police equipment is available online and at security supply stores, including strobe lighting for vehicles and uniforms that can be made to look very real with very little alteration. It is certainly worth considering whether there are steps that might be taken to limit the availability of such items.

Second, the government could partner with police in a public awareness campaign to inform Canadians that all police officers carry badges and photo ID and that citizens themselves have the right to request to see an officer's identification and to call 9-1-1 for verification if they are truly suspicious. By empowering Canadians in this way, as well as by reducing the availability of authentic looking police equipment, we would significantly limit the capacity of offenders to pass as officers of the peace.

In conclusion, as I said at the outset, I support and applaud the member for Red Deer for consistently focusing the attention of the House on this very important issue and I will support Bill C-444 at second reading. At the very least, the bill would serve as a statement by Parliament of the seriousness with which we regard the crime of personation of a peace officer. However, we should seek to do more than make what is nonetheless a very important statement.

As I have outlined, there may be concrete steps that we could take that would have an impact on the occurrence of the crime itself. I trust that we will have the opportunity to discuss such steps at committee and that the government will take a seriously impactful action to combat the personation of peace officers in the very near future as represented in the private member's bill of the member for Red Deer.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

moved that Bill C-444, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (personating peace officer or public officer), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to speak today to my private member's bill, Bill C-444, which seeks to amend section 130 of the Criminal Code by adding a sentencing provision for the offence of personating peace officers or public officers. The amendment would make personating an officer for the purpose of committing another offence an aggravating circumstance.

I would like the thank the hon. member for Oxford for seconding my bill. He served 30 years with the Woodstock police service in his past life and 10 of those were as chief of police. He is a great Canadian who continues to proudly serve our country.

I was moved to research and table the bill following a horrible crime that took place in my riding. Flashing lights and a police uniform were used as weapons to abduct a 16-year-old girl. She had just earned her driver's licence and was driving alone, as many of us do. She was held captive for 46 hours and brutally assaulted before she managed to escape from her attacker. She was brave. She survived.

The offender was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced with six offences, one of which was section 130 of the Criminal Code, which deals with personation of a peace officer or public officer.

The cold fact of the matter was that she was abducted only because she thought she was doing the right thing. When confronted by someone she thought was a police officer, she did what she had been taught to do. She stopped and she followed instructions. In this case, she ultimately lost any opportunity she might have had to protect herself.

This is one case that happened in my riding, but unfortunately this is a crime that is occurring in all regions of Canada and most often it is for the purpose of tricking a victim into thinking that they are under the control of a real officer so that another crime can also be committed.

When I began researching this issue, I found that what had happened in Penhold and Red Deer was happening in small towns and large cities all over Canada. Criminals are using authentic police lights and dressing in police uniforms to commit crimes such as auto theft and fraud in Kelowna; highway robbery in Oakville, Barrie and Brampton; assault and robbery in Ottawa; abductions in Scarborough and Calgary; break and enter and subsequent assaults in Sydney Mines and Oshawa; intimidation in Mississauga; unlawful confinement in Lethbridge; and fraud in Kings Country, Brantford and Toronto.

For the young woman in my riding, and all of these victims, the police uniform no longer represents safety and security. With time, they will cope with this fear and will hopefully regain their trust in authority. However, every time we hear of these types of incidents, one more person has this trust shattered. This is a concern for all of us, but it is a great concern for police who are out there trying to do their jobs.

The police who I have spoken to in my riding, RCMP veterans and serving members, have encouraged me in my mission to add this sentencing provision to section 130. It would not affect their enforcement of the offence, but they recognize that this amendment would help ensure that sentencing for this crime would reflect the significant impact that it has on our country.

There was a case in Calgary where a man personated a police officer and used flashing lights to attempt to pull over and abduct young females. CBC News quoted a sergeant with the Calgary Police Force who stated that the false representation of a police officer was “a very serious offence”. He went on to say, “We cannot have our confidence in the public eroded. It is very important that we are able to conduct our jobs, and if people do not trust the police or they are worried, it can make our jobs very difficult”.

I previously introduced the bill during the last Parliament. It had been reported back to the House by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The unanimous support that I received from the House was extremely encouraging, and I look forward to that same level of support from this Parliament.

As I describe the specific points of the bill, let me start by explaining the definition of peace officers and public officers in the Criminal Code.

The Criminal Code defines police officers as Canadian officers of customs and excise, immigration, corrections, fisheries and the Canadian Forces. It includes pilots in command of an aircraft, mayors, wardens, reeves, sheriffs, justices of the peace and, of course, police officers.

A public officer is defined as an officer of customs or excise, an officer of the Canadian Forces, an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and any officer while the officer is engaged in enforcing the laws of Canada relating to revenue, customs, excise, trade or navigation.

The bottom line is that these are all occupations that demand a significant amount of trust from the Canadian public. Anyone who falsely represents members of these occupations in order to commit a crime against a person is committing a serious breach of that person's trust, and that of all of us.

However, this bill is about sentencing. It speaks to the need for tougher penalties for this particular crime, in line with the fundamental sentencing principle of proportionality, which is stated in section 718 of the Criminal Code. The bill has a basic objective. It would make impersonating a peace officer in the commission of another offence an aggravating circumstance to be considered for sentencing purposes. It would add one clause to the Criminal Code following section 130.

Because it is short, I would like to read my bill into the record. It states that the Criminal Code is amended by adding the following after section 130:

130.1 If a person is convicted of an offence under section 130, the court imposing the sentence on the person shall consider as an aggravating circumstance the fact that the accused personated a peace officer or a public officer, as the case may be, for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence.

That is all. It does not seek to effect any interpretation of the crime. My bill would simply direct a sentencing court to consider this as one factor when dealing with someone convicted of impersonating a peace officer or a public officer.

We know that a number of factors come into play in a sentencing decision, such as the criminal record of the offender or the severity of harm caused to a victim. Aggravating circumstances are just one more factor that sentencing judges are required to consider that do not guarantee, but tend to increase, the severity of a sentence.

There are aggravating circumstances defined in section 718 that apply to all criminal offences. There are also aggravating circumstances attached to specific offences within the code. To be clear, the bill seeks to add the special aggravating circumstance to a sentencing court to consider the crime of impersonating a peace officer or public officer.

When we look at aggravating circumstances that apply to all offences, one of them is evidence that the offender, in committing an offence, abused a position of trust or authority in relation to the victim. This would apply in situations where an offender has an existing relationship with a victim, such as a teacher, a coach or a bona fide police officer. However, those who impersonate officers do not fall into this category. Offenders who impersonate peace or public officers have not abused a position of authority, for he or she does not have that position to begin with. This circumstance in section 718 cannot then be used, since this would apply to real police officers who have abused their position of trust. It does not apply to those who are posing as police officers.

An offender's false representation of him or herself as an officer is intended to deceive and breach trust and authority. However, this deceit is not captured by the existing circumstances that speak to these abuses. I hope that my colleagues in the House will recognize this gap in the law and work with me to fill it, as my bill seeks to do. We know that adding a new aggravating circumstance to the Criminal Code is an effective way to ensure that the fundamental sentencing principles are achieved.

As to the relevance of aggravating circumstances, Parliament recently passed an important bill on elder abuse, Bill C-36. With its passage into law we saw a very important amendment to the Criminal Code, adding a new aggravating circumstance to section 718.2 to apply to any offence against elderly Canadians. With this bill we are now seeking to apply this rationale when it comes to sentencing for crimes against Canadians who have been misled into thinking they are dealing with an officer but are then victimized.

The sentence for this kind of malicious deceit must reflect the significant impact that the crime has on the lives of victims. Victims, whoever they may be, must be assured that there will be serious consequences for the criminals who have hurt them.

By supporting the bill, we are also helping to preserve the trust and respect that citizens have for real, bona fide police officers. When citizens see a police uniform, they naturally trust and respect the authority that comes with it. Our laws must reflect this reality.

I note that personation of an officer used to be punishable as a summary conviction and had a maximum penalty of only six months imprisonment. The Conservative government in the previous Parliament passed into law former Bill S-4, which increased the maximum penalty for this offence to five years imprisonment and made it a hybrid offence. I commend the Department of Justice for its work on increasing the maximum sentence for this crime, which came into force two years ago. Now we must give the courts this sentencing tool to exercise the new maximum in the most serious cases.

For 34 years I worked as a teacher of children and young adults. As a teacher, I shared their joys of accomplishment as well as their concerns about the future. I was always there to help them through difficult times when they had to deal with terrible ordeals. Being a receptive ear to their voices gave me an understanding of how difficult and fragile life can be.

As a member of Parliament I have once again heard such a voice. I shared the same concerns as others in our community when I heard of the disappearance of a young girl from Penhold. Prayers were all that I could offer. No one knew why her car was left where it was. There was nothing to indicate that she would have strayed from the errand that she was on. Her parents were frantic and our community of central Alberta empathized while we all waited. Finally the news broke that she had been found.

Only then did the pieces of this horrible ordeal start to make sense. The weapons used by her attacker were flashing lights and an RCMP uniform. That is why the car was left there. Her trust of the uniform and the false sense of safety and authority that it presented to her resulted in the most horrendous 46 hours that anyone could imagine.

The subsequent trial of her abductor forced the girl and her family to relive this ordeal. Finally a verdict and a sentence was rendered, but two things haunted them. First was the knowledge that the crime of personating a peace officer amounted to, in those days, only six months imprisonment, which was the maximum sentence allowed before the passage of Bill S-4. Second was that in the commission of this crime, the weapons used to lure her into a trap would not be recognized for what they really were. She had been deceived by the trust she had in the police and the weapon of deceit was considered more of a side issue than the catalyst for the crime.

The day that this brave young lady and her mother came to me for help was the day I knew they needed the receptive ear that I had while I was a teacher, and it would also be part of my job as a member of Parliament. It is my hope that all of my colleagues can recognize the importance of the bill and will see that it is worth supporting.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Okay.

Mr. Dreeshen, we know each other because we are both members of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. You talked about a Bill S-4 clause that would amend section 130 of the Criminal Code, which deals with sentences. I would like to know which clause you had in mind. You talked about it in your presentation. You talked about a section that would be amended so that a five-year sentence, I think, is imposed. I would like to know which clause you were talking about.

In addition, do you think that the amendment you are proposing will result in the imposing of a consecutive sentence, or could the judge impose a concurrent sentence under section 130?

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Through you, Mr. Chair, I express my sincere appreciation to each of my colleagues for this opportunity to address the justice and human rights committee regarding my private member's bill, Bill C-576, personating a peace officer.

I'd like to start by saying that I appreciate the support received during second reading, which allowed this bill to be sent to your committee, and the willingness of my colleagues from all parties to carry this discussion forward.

As the committee is aware, I was moved to table this bill following discussions I had with the victim of a horrendous crime in my central Alberta riding of Red Deer. Flashing lights and a police uniform were used as weapons to abduct a 16-year-old who had just earned her driver's licence. This brave young woman was held captive for 46 hours and brutally assaulted before she managed to escape from her attacker. The cold fact of the matter was that she was abducted only because she thought she was doing the right thing. When confronted by someone she thought was a police officer, she did what she had been taught to do: she stopped and she followed instructions. And in this case, she ultimately lost any opportunity she might have had to protect herself.

When citizens see a police uniform, they naturally trust the authority that comes with it. Personating a police officer is a serious breach of the public's trust, and it has the same effect as using a weapon: it forces the victim to submit.

It has another effect that is also of great concern, not only for the general public but for the police who are out there trying to do their jobs. Mr. Chair, for this young woman, the police uniform no longer represents safety and security. With time, she will cope with this fear and will hopefully regain her trust in authority. But every time we hear of these types of incidents, one more person has had this trust shattered.

The police I have spoken to in my riding, both RCMP veterans and serving members, have also encouraged me in my quest to have the Criminal Code amended so that the personation of a peace officer in the commission of another offence be considered an aggravating circumstance for sentencing purposes.

This bill seeks to add one short section following section 130, which committee members will have before them. That is all it does. It does not seek to affect any interpretation of the offence. It would simply direct a sentencing court to consider an aggravating circumstance when dealing with the conviction under section 130.

To expand the discussion further, there are aggravating circumstances defined in section 718 that apply to all criminal offences. There are also some special cases of aggravating circumstances attached to specific offences within the code. To be clear, this bill seeks to be a special aggravating circumstance in regard to the specific offence of personating a peace officer.

Of course, within the parameters of the maximum sentence for personating a peace officer, the appropriateness of a sentence would still rest with the sentencing court. But it is up to us, as legislators, to establish sentencing provisions in the Criminal Code. Therefore, we should recognize that this is a crime that can have varying degrees of harm and therefore should be penalized accordingly.

I was aware that with the changes introduced with Bill S-4, the maximum sentence for personation was increased to five years from six months. The specific case I have outlined was dealt with prior to its passage, so there was only a six-month sentence allowed. But it did beg the question of whether personation of a peace officer is not just as serious to a victim as being abused by a person in a real position of authority, which is considered to be an aggravating circumstance.

Some of the specifics I encountered when I first started looking at this issue related to section 718 of the Criminal Code, which sets the principles of sentencing. In section 718.2, we see that aggravating circumstances would be involved if there was “evidence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused a position of trust or authority in relation to the victim”. This would apply if an offender had an existing relationship with the victim, such as a teacher or a coach, or it would apply to a real police officer who may have abused a position of trust, but it doesn't apply to offenders who are posing as police officers.

I hope this committee will recognize this gap in the law and work with me to fill it through the acceptance of my private member's bill.

Mr. Chair, during debate in the House, all parties remarked about the lack of credence that was given to this type of public deception. It was only in the preparation of comments that the prevalence of this deceit in the commission of crimes in Canada was brought to a conscious level for members. For victims, it's always at a conscious level.

In section 130, the crime is in the deception of the public about a person's status as a peace officer, whether or not it was for the specific purpose of facilitating another crime and whether or not another crime is actually attempted or committed. But in cases where the deception is intended and in fact does facilitate the commission of another more serious crime, this is an extremely serious instance of the offence of personating a peace officer and therefore it deserves an appropriately high sentence.

In conclusion, let's give the sentencing courts the tools they need to apply appropriate sentences in serious cases and thereby seek to protect innocent people from these types of crimes.

Again, thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for your prompt study of this bill. I am pleased to answer questions from members.

Abolition of Early Parole Act

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I join in the debate on Bill C-59, the Abolition of Early Parole Act today.

Like many of my colleagues, the hon. members in this House, I have spent quite some time talking to Canadians about the need for this legislation. I am confident that all of us are hearing the same thing; that it is time to take action to crack down on white-collar offenders and we need to do it now.

I have heard from victims who have told me that they are tired of seeing and hearing about offenders who have perhaps wiped out their life savings and are not serving appropriate times for their actions. I have spoken to ordinary Canadians and to the families of innocent victims and they told me that it was time for all of us to work together to crack down on the activities of white-collar offenders who might not use a gun but who, nonetheless, wreak havoc on the lives of hard-working and law-abiding Canadians. They told me that we need to get tough on those offenders whose illegal activities leave scores of victims in their wake.

I am therefore pleased to support the bill before us today, which would do all of that and would build on our government's already impressive record of standing up for victims and cracking down on all types of crime.

Over the last five years, our government has done a lot to make our streets safer through investments in crime prevention, law enforcement and in the tools for police officers to do their jobs. In fact, several of our justice bills last year alone received royal assent, including: Bill C-14, which targets gang violence and organized crime by addressing issues such as gang murders, drive-by shootings and additional protection for police and the police officers; Bill C-25, which fulfills our government's commitment to Canadians to help keep offenders from being given two-for-one credit and sometimes three-for-one credit in pre-sentencing custody; and Bill S-4, which will help combat the complex, serious and growing problem of identity theft and identity fraud.

I am also proud to say that our government recently passed legislation to help reform the pardon system. In particular, we have made sure that the National Parole Board of Canada has the discretion it needs to determine whether granting a pardon would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

We have passed legislation targeting gang violence and organized crime by addressing issues such as gang murders, drive-by shootings and additional protection for police officers.

We recently passed legislation to strengthen the National Sex Offenders Registry and the national DNA data bank in order to better protect our children and other vulnerable members of society from sexual predators.

Of course our government has most recently introduced legislation to crack down on individuals involved in the despicable crime of human smuggling, which threatens our communities as well as Canada's immigration system.

In addition, our government has provided more money to the provinces and the territories so that they can hire additional police officers. I am very proud to note that Statistics Canada reported in December that the number of police officers across Canada is now at its highest point since 1981.

As well, the government has taken action to help young people make smart choices and avoid becoming involved in gang activity through programs funded through the National Crime Prevention Centre.

Our government has taken significant action that achieves results in tackling crime in our communities. We will continue to do more.

It is no secret that crimes and criminal activities can take on many forms. We often hear about violent gun crimes and communities which can and often do shatter lives. As I have mentioned, our government has done a lot to get tough with offenders who commit such terrible acts.

Of course, there are other types of crimes that can be just as devastating even though they do not involve the use of handguns. All of us have heard about the ruined lives left behind by white-collar offenders who prey on law-abiding citizens, often leaving them with nothing to show for a lifetime of hard work and savings for their retirement.

All of us have heard about the need to take action, to crack down on white-collar crime and stand up for the victims. That is what the legislation before us today would do.

As we have heard today, many offenders obtain parole early through a process called accelerated parole review. First-time offenders who have committed non-violent offences can access day parole at one-sixth of their sentence and full parole at one-third of their sentence. Unless the Parole Board of Canada has reasonable grounds to believe these offenders will commit a violent offence if released, it must release them into the community.

This means that, in some cases, a fraudster, a thief or even a drug dealer can be back on the streets early. Such an offender could be sentenced to 12 years but actually be released into the community on day parole in just 2 short years and fully paroled at just 4 years. The status quo gives the Parole Board little or no discretion in dealing with these cases. The test is whether an offender is likely to commit a violent offence. As a result, even if the Parole Board believes the offender is likely to commit another fraud, another theft or another drug offence, it is nonetheless compelled to release them.

What makes the review process even more expedited is that these accelerated parole reviews are accomplished through a paper review by the Parole Board of Canada, whereas regular parole reviews are normally done by way of a hearing.

The test for accelerated parole review is also lower. The Parole Board of Canada only has to have reasonable grounds to believe that the offender will not commit a violent offence, whereas, with other offenders, the test is whether the person is an undue risk to commit any type of crime if released. The test for accelerated parole review is whether someone is going to commit a violent offence. Even if the Parole Board believes that someone will commit another fraud, the board is still compelled to release the person under supervision at one-sixth of his or her sentence. In many cases that means that people who are convicted of crimes that have had devastating effects on the lives and livelihood of Canadians often spend very little time in prison. The end result is that offenders convicted of white-collar crimes are often released under supervision after only a very few short months. Offenders are given lengthy sentences which do not result in much time actually spent in prison.

This offends Canadians' sense of justice and it undermines their faith in our justice and in our corrections system. It should offend all of our senses of justice, and we need to change this. Canadians want change and that is what our government is delivering.

Bill C-59 would abolish accelerated parole review and repeal sections of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act that govern the accelerated parole review regime. It would mean that offenders who commit non-violent or white-collar crimes are put on the same footing as other offenders. They would be eligible for regular day parole review six months prior to full parole eligibility and full parole review after serving one-third of their sentence. Rather than being subject to a paper review, they would be subject to an in-person hearing. The test as to whether they should be released would be whether they present an unmanageable risk of committing another crime. It is a very key point and something that all members should highlight.

The changes that our government is proposing would mean that Canadians can have faith that offenders convicted of white-collar crimes will not escape full accountability for their actions.

Our government has listened to the concerns of victims of fraud and other crimes and we are taking action on their concerns. By fixing the problem of early parole for offenders, we are following through on our tackling crime agenda. Our government believes that Canadians deserve a justice system that balances the rights of offenders with the rights of law-abiding citizens.

The commitment we are announcing today brings us another step closer to this important goal. Once again I urge all hon. members to work with the government to ensure that Bill C-59 is passed into law in the most timely way possible.

Criminal Code

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today in support of Bill C-576, which deals with the offence of personating a peace officer. The offence essentially criminalizes the act of pretending to be a peace officer or public officer when one in fact does not hold such an office.

This offence, located at section 130 of the Criminal Code, was a straight summary conviction offence until recently. Summary conviction offences carry a maximum of six months in prison and a maximum fine of $5,000 or both. Our government hybridized these offences in former Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

Bill S-4 made a number of important changes to the Criminal Code. In particular it enacted a new offence called identity theft, which prohibits the obtaining or processing of another person's identity information with the intent to use that information in the commission of another criminal offence. It also changed the name of the existing offence of personation to identity fraud. Personation is an offence for pretending to be another person with the intent to gain advantage or cause a disadvantage.

Identity theft is usually followed by identity fraud. First one obtains another person's identity information. This is identity theft. Then it can be manipulated into false documents or combined with other information to create a false identity, and finally, the information is used to deceive someone about the identity of the person in front of them.

Identity crime is flourishing, as we all know, and these criminal law amendments are a crucial element in the struggle to keep Canadians' identities and their property safe.

In addition to these important amendments, Bill S-4 also hybridized the offence of personating a peace officer or public officer. As of January 8 of this year, personating a peace officer is no longer a straight summary conviction offence. It is now a hybrid offence. When prosecuted on indictment, this offence is now punishable by up to five years in prison.

It is interesting to note that in many countries like Canada, peace officer personation is still considered a relatively minor offence. In a number of U.S. and Australian states, as well as the United Kingdom, peace officer personation is punishable by a maximum of a few months or a year or two. Only in a few jurisdictions does the maximum penalty rise to five years.

This new sentencing regime for police personation in Canada is therefore above average for similar jurisdictions.

As of the passing of Bill S-4, this offence is no longer treated as a minor offence. It is now a serious offence, which protects the integrity of important government institutions and offices and guards against the many harmful consequences that could flow when a citizen is misled about whether a person has the authority to act in an official capacity.

For instance, a motorist who has just witnessed an accident might report the accident to someone he or she believed was a peace officer but who in fact was not. The good Samaritan might genuinely believe he or she had fulfilled a civic duty by reporting the incident to law enforcement and might believe that the matter would be acted upon and any injured persons would be provided with adequate care. But the impostor likely intends to move on without taking any action to assist those involved in the accident. This kind of situation poorly serves everyone involved. The importance of public trust in the police can never be underestimated.

Fortunately, charges for personating a peace officer are relatively rare in Canada, but I must admit they are increasing in numbers and severity.

But still there are concerns about this kind of crime, as Bill C-576 reminds us. Sometimes people impersonate the police for the simple thrill of feeling powerful or for other relatively minor objectives, such as obtaining information.

But other times, as we have heard here tonight, police personation is closely associated with other offences. In these cases, a criminal will pretend to be a police officer in the hopes that this deception will make it easier to commit other crimes. Most members of the public will acquiesce to the authority of someone they believe to be a police officer. The personation of police in these cases is an attempt to exploit a person's trust and confidence in law enforcement. These kinds of situation are the most troubling and are especially deserving of condemnation by sentencing courts as well as this Parliament.

This is precisely what Bill C-576 does by making it a mandatory aggravating factor on sentencing for the crime of personating a peace officer if the offence was committed for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence. Bill C-576 draws attention to this rare but devastating practice.

It is true that sentencing judges already have the discretion to consider any and all aggravating factors that might be applicable in any given case. The codification of aggravating sentencing factors does not really allow the courts to do anything they are not already empowered to do. Each factor that is mentioned in the Criminal Code adds to the complexity and size of it, so this is not a form of legislation we should endorse as a matter of routine practice.

Bill C-576 is worthy of support because it speaks to a horrific kind of criminality, which has so many negative consequences. Using someone's trust in the police as a weapon against them is extremely disturbing to us all.

There are the direct consequences suffered by a victim of such a deception, whether it is the theft of their property, an invasion of their home or a violation of their sexual or bodily integrity. The victim may also suffer a host of indirect harms, such as loss of trust in the police. Society at large suffers a reduction in its ability to trust public institutions if this crime becomes more common.

It is premature to say that this crime is increasing in frequency, but there have been a number of incidents reported in the papers in the last few years. There was a case involving drivers being stopped by a police impersonator and requested to pay immediately for an alleged speeding offence. We heard that just recently. Another case involved motorists who were followed after leaving a casino and then pulled over and robbed of their winnings. There have also been profoundly disturbing cases involving police personation in order to get someone into a car to kidnap them.

The case in the sponsoring member's riding of Red Deer was a devastating case involving the abduction and sexual assault of a teenaged girl. The perpetrator in that case was apprehended, pleaded guilty to a number of offences and is currently serving an 18-year sentence. There are occasionally other stories of sexual assaults that have been facilitated by police personation, and I am aware of several myself.

All Canadians should be concerned about these cases. However, we do not want Canadians to become suspicious of all police officers. This will make the work of law enforcement even more difficult. Nor do we want Canadians to be at an elevated risk of being victimized by blindly trusting the mere assertion of authority. It is a difficult balance to achieve.

The exercise of a little caution is a good thing. An attentive citizen who is approached by someone representing himself or herself as a police officer should look for suspicious behaviour, such as unusual requests by the officer or unusual actions. It is reasonable and acceptable to ask questions of police officers or to ask to see their badge or warrant card specifically and closely verify that the uniform they are wearing bears the name of the locality one is in, rather than just being a generic-looking uniform. People should look for specifics.

This kind of verification process should always be done respectfully and cautiously, but in general, Canadians should not be afraid to seek confirmation that the person who claims to have a certain authority actually does have that authority.

Raising awareness in Canadians of this tremendous and horrific crime of personating a police officer and then using that to commit a crime should be supported by everyone in the House, and I certainly do, as does my friend's Conservative caucus.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

moved that Bill C-576, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (personating peace officer), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to speak during this hour of debate to my Bill C-576, which deals with the crime of personating a peace officer.

I would like to thank the hon. member for Kitchener—Conestoga for seconding this bill. I am grateful to my colleagues in the House who recognize the merit of this minor yet important addition to the Criminal Code.

I was inspired to table this bill following a horrible crime that took place in my constituency. The offender was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. The case is no longer in the court. But I have had discussions with the victim of this crime and I would like to talk about what I have learned.

Flashing lights and a police uniform were used as weapons to abduct a 16 year old girl. She had just earned her driver's licence and was driving alone, as many of us do. She was held captive for 46 hours and brutally assaulted before she managed to escape from her attacker. She was brave. She survived.

It is a fact that she was abducted because she was led to believe that she had been pulled over by a police officer. When citizens see a police uniform, they naturally trust the authority that comes with it. Personating a police officer is a serious breach of the public's trust, and it has the same effect as using a weapon. It forces the victim to submit.

This crime involved personating a police officer, but I recognize that there are other occupations besides police officers that serve to keep the peace in our great country and they are all covered by the Criminal Code's definition of a peace officer.

As I describe the specific points of this bill, let me start by explaining the definition of peace officer in the Criminal Code. They are positions that demand a significant amount of trust from the Canadian public. Anyone who falsely represents these occupations to commit a crime against a person is committing a serious breach of that person's trust and that of all of us.

The Criminal Code defines peace officers as Canadian officers of customs and excise, immigration, corrections, fisheries and the Canadian Forces. It includes pilots in command of an aircraft, mayors, wardens, reeves, sheriffs, justices of the peace and, of course, police officers.

When I began researching this issue I found that what had happened in Penhold and Red Deer was not a rare crime. This is happening in small towns and large cities all over Canada. Criminals are using authentic police lights and dressing in police uniforms in crimes such as auto theft and fraud in Kelowna; highway robbery in Oakville, Barrie and Brampton; assault and robbery in Ottawa; abductions in Scarborough and Calgary; break and enter and subsequent assaults in Sydney Mines and Oshawa; intimidation in Mississauga; unlawful confinement in Lethbridge; and fraud in King's County, Brantford and Toronto.

This bill has a basic objective. It would make personating a peace officer in the commission of another offence an aggravating circumstance to be considered for sentencing purposes. It would add one clause to the Criminal Code following section 130. Because it is short, I would like to read my bill into the record:

1. The Criminal Code is amended by adding the following after section 130:

130.1 If a person is convicted of an offence under section 130, the court imposing the sentence on the person shall consider as an aggravating circumstance the fact that the accused personated a peace officer for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence.

That is all. It does not seek to affect any interpretation of the crime. My bill would simply direct a sentencing court to consider this as one factor when dealing with someone convicted of personating a peace officer.

In carrying out the objectives of sentencing, which are in section 718 of the Criminal Code, a judge can take into account aggravating circumstances, which tend to increase the length of a sentence, or mitigating circumstances, which tend to shorten the length of a sentence.

There are aggravating circumstances that are defined in section 718 that apply to all offences and there are also special cases of aggravating circumstances that apply to specific offences within the code. But to clarify, this bill seeks to be a special aggravating circumstance for a sentencing court to consider for the crime of personating a peace officer.

The decision of what sentence is appropriate always rests with the court, but it is our role as legislators to maintain the Criminal Code and establish sentencing provisions. I note that this offence used to be punishable as a summary conviction and had a maximum penalty of only six months' imprisonment.

This Parliament passed into law former Bill S-4, which increased the maximum penalty for this offence to five years' imprisonment and made it a hybrid offence. I commend the Department of Justice for its work on increasing the maximum sentence for this crime, which came into force on January 8 of this year. I applaud all of my colleagues in the House who voted in favour of Bill S-4 and brought this change into law.

On behalf of the people Red Deer, I was proud to vote for Bill S-4. I am also proud to support all of the government's tough on crime initiatives. Bill S-4 successfully tackled the problem of identity theft and fortunately, it also significantly addressed the problem of lax sentencing for personating peace officers. This was absolutely justified, as predators are deliberately posing as peace officers to lure their victims. I believe that with this increased maximum sentence, we must now also recognize that this crime can have varying degrees of harm as well, and should be penalized accordingly.

A number of factors come into play in a sentencing decision, such as the criminal record of the offender or the severity of harm caused to a victim. Aggravating circumstances are just one more factor that sentencing judges are required to consider that tend to, but are not guaranteed to, increase the severity of the sentence.

When we look at aggravating circumstances that are in section 718 of the Criminal Code, one of them is evidence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused a position of trust or authority in relation to the victim. This would apply in situations where an offender has an existing relationship with the victim, such as a teacher or a coach, or indeed a bona fide peace officer.

However, those who personate peace officers do not fall into this category. I have many esteemed colleagues in the House who are legal experts. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that offenders who personate peace officers have not abused a position of authority, for they do not have that position to begin with. This circumstance in section 718 cannot be used, since this would apply to real police officers who would abuse their position of trust. It does not apply to those who are posing as police officers.

If I may reiterate, an offender's false representation of himself or herself as a peace officer is intended to deceive and breach trust and authority, but this deceit is not captured by the existing circumstances that speak to these abuses. I hope that my colleagues in the House will recognize this gap in the law and work with me to fill it as my bill seeks to do.

The House is graced with some former police officers who bring valuable experience to our debate on justice issues and many other issues. I have had discussions with these hon. members about my bill, and I appreciate their support, for they have the unique perspective of having served as police officers. They are very busy people, but they have taken the time to read my bill and offer their support, and I thank them for that.

Police officers are often victims themselves. They serve us all with great courage. They keep us safe from those who would do harm and rarely see justice for crimes that are committed against them personally. We know that the Crown sometimes drops charges of assault against police officers to obtain guilty pleas. As victims who have not been vindicated by the courts would surely confirm, it must be an agonizing outcome for someone to personally deal with, no matter who the person is. I want to recognize and honour all peace officers in Canada. They are all affected by the crime that we are discussing today.

People who have been hurt by someone posing as a police officer understandably would become fearful and have difficulty trusting real police officers. This is very unfortunate, as it affects these victims every single time they encounter a real police officer. It also affects police who are trying to do their job.

There was a case in Calgary where a man personated a police officer and used flashing lights to attempt to pull people over to abduct young females. CBC News quoted a sergeant with the Calgary Police Force who stated that the false representation of a police officer was “a very serious offence”. He went on to say, “We cannot have our confidence in the public eroded. It is very important that we are able to conduct our jobs, and if people do not trust the police or they are worried, it can make our jobs very difficult”.

As that police officer stated, this is a serious crime that has far-reaching consequences, which is further proof that the government did the right thing by significantly increasing the maximum penalty for this crime as former Bill S-4 did.

Police will often remind the public how we can recognize if someone is actually posing as an officer. As police have said, they always carry photo ID and badges. People should never be opening their doors or get our of their cars without seeing photo ID and a badge. An officer will show these when requested. If Canadians are in doubt as to whether or not someone is actually a police officer, they are advised to call 911.

For 34 years I worked with children and young adults. As their teacher I shared their joys of accomplishment as well as their concerns about the future. I was always there to help them through difficult times when they had to deal with terrible ordeals, being a receptive ear to their voices gave me an understanding of how difficult and fragile life can be.

As a member of Parliament I have once again heard such a voice. I shared the same concerns as others in our community when I heard of the disappearance of a young girl from Penhold. Prayers were all that I could offer. No one knew why her car would be left where it was. There was nothing to indicate that she would have strayed from the errand that she was on, nothing. Her parents were frantic and our community of central Alberta empathized while we all waited. Finally the news broke. She had been found.

Only then did the pieces of this horrible ordeal start to make sense. The weapons used by her attacker were flashing lights and an RCMP uniform. That is why the car was left where it was. Her trust of the uniform and the false sense of safety and authority that it presented to her resulted in the most horrendous 46 hours that anyone could imagine.

The subsequent trial of her abductor forced the girl and her family to relive this ordeal. Finally a verdict and a sentence was rendered, but two things haunted them: first, the knowledge that the crime of personating a peace officer amounted to only six months' imprisonment, which was the maximum sentence allowed before the passage of Bill S-4; and second, that in the commission of this crime the weapons used to lure her into a trap would not be recognized for what they really were. She had been deceived of the trust she had in the police and the weapon of deceit was considered as more of a side issue than being the catalyst for the crime.

Personating a police officer to force someone to do something in the hands of a criminal is just as effective as pointing a firearm. It is no less aggravating than breaking and entering with the knowledge that a residence is occupied nor many of the other situations that fall into the category of aggravating circumstances. It is no different to a victim than having been abused by a real, existing position of authority.

Crimes involving firearms and break and entering with intent to encounter a resident necessitates special circumstances in the courts. They are rationalized as aggravating circumstances to ensure that they are treated as seriously as they should be. This is what my bill is designed to do.

As it now reads in section 130 the crime is in the deception of the public about a person's status as a peace officer. It does not differentiate whether or not it was for a specific purpose of facilitating another crime or whether or not another crime is actually attempted or committed. In cases where the deception is intended to and in fact does facilitate the commission of another more serious crime, this is an extremely serious instance of the offence of personating a peace officer and therefore deserves an appropriately high sentence. This bill would give the sentencing courts the tools they need to apply appropriate sentences in these cases.

The day that this brave young lady and her mother came to me for help was the day I knew that my receptive ear that was necessary as a teacher would also be part of my job as a member of Parliament.

I appreciate the help that has been provided to me by representatives in the justice department, the Minister of Justice and the rest of my caucus. I would also like to acknowledge the great work of the talented researchers in the Library of Parliament. I also appreciate the support and understanding that I have received from my colleagues in other parties.

It is my hope that all of my colleagues can recognize the importance of this bill and will see that it is worth supporting.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm pleased to be here before the members of the standing committee to answer questions or hear comments concerning supplementary estimates (B) for the Department of Justice.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, our government was elected on a promise to tackle crime, and we're unwavering in our commitment to fighting crime and protecting Canadians so that our communities are safe places for people to live, raise their families, and do business. To help us fulfill that commitment, I've relied on the advice and the tireless efforts of the employees of the Department of Justice, and I deeply appreciate their support as our government moves forward with its crime agenda.

Our government firmly believes that the protection of society must remain the first priority of our criminal justice system and that sentences should reflect the severity of the crime. To that effect, we've succeeded in implementing legislation to ensure adequate sentences, such as our comprehensive Tackling Violent Crime Act, which legislated tougher jail time for serious gun crimes, increased the age of protection from 14 to 16 years to better protect our youth from adult sexual predators, and provided strong penalties for alcohol-impaired driving. In addition, we've also increased penalties for those convicted of street racing, ended conditional sentences for serious personal injury offences, and passed legislation to combat illegal copying of films in movie theatres.

In our fight against identity theft, we have succeeded in adding three new offences to the Criminal Code through Bill S-4, targeting the early stages of identity-related crime and giving the police the tools they had been lacking to move against this ever growing problem before the damage is done.

With regard to gangs and organized crime, we have passed Bill C-14, which will increase penalties for murders and reckless shootings connected to these activities. Once it comes into force, any murder connected to organized crime activity will automatically be considered first degree and subject to a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for 25 years.

On October 22, our government succeeded in eliminating two-for-one credit for time spent in jail while waiting for trial, a practice that disproportionately reduced prison sentences for some violent offenders. Police associations, victim groups, and indeed all provinces and territories expressed their support for that bill.

Mr. Chairman, our government has made great strides, but there is more that we can be doing to protect Canadians. For example, in recent months I have spoken to victims of various fraud schemes and white collar crime, and they clearly attested to the gravity of those crimes. Fraud can have a devastating impact on the lives of its victims, not only as it affects their financial security but also through feelings of humiliation for having been deceived and voluntarily handing over their life savings. These schemes can be every bit as devastating as a physical assault.

The determination of these victims to call for action on fraud in the face of their emotional turmoil reaffirmed the need to act quickly and effectively against this type of crime. That's why I recently introduced Bill C-52, which cracks down on white collar crime and fraud and increases justice for victims.

These measures will allow victims to be heard and their concerns to be taken seriously by the courts.

We've also taken extremely seriously the many instances of child sexual exploitation facilitated by the Internet. The worldwide web provides new and easier means for offenders to make, view, and distribute child pornography, resulting in a significant increase not only in the availability and volume of pornography but also in the level of violence perpetrated against children.

Our government recently proposed a mandatory reporting regime across Canada that will require suppliers of Internet services to report certain information about Internet child pornography. This is one more step in our efforts to better protect children from sexual predators and help police rescue these young victims and prosecute the criminals responsible.

Our government has shown its concern for the victims of multiple murderers and their families. We firmly believe that the families of murder victims should not be made to feel that the life of their loved one doesn't count. This is why I tabled Bill C-36, which will permit judges to impose consecutive periods of parole ineligibility for multiple murderers.

While there can only be one life sentence for an offender who commits more than one murder, the parole ineligibility period, 25 years in the case of a first-degree murderer, could be imposed consecutively for each subsequent murder. In addition, we continue to seek elimination of the “faint hope” clause of the Criminal Code. By saying no to early parole for murderers, our government hopes to spare families the pain of attending repeated parole eligibility hearings and having to re-live these unspeakable losses over and over again.

Both of these pieces of legislation would acknowledge the value of every life taken by this most serious of crimes. It would ensure the criminals responsible serve a sentence that more adequately reflects the gravity of their crimes.

Mr. Chair, protecting people is a priority, not an afterthought. Our government remains committed to improving our justice system in order to properly address the problem of drug producers and traffickers.

Last spring I was in Vancouver to announce, alongside senior law enforcement officials, that our government was seeking to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act by introducing Bill C-15.

This legislation would impose mandatory sentences on drug producers and traffickers, especially targeting the criminal enterprise of gangs and other violent criminal organizations, because we know that drugs are the currency of organized crime.

Having this legislation passed as quickly as possible would better protect our communities and send a clear message that if you produce and traffic in marijuana, if you're into the grow op business in residential neighbourhoods, if you threaten the safety of Canada's communities, you will serve jail time.

It's been six months since that bill was referred to the Senate. It's still not out of committee. I certainly urge all members of Parliament to do whatever we can to ensure and promote and push to get that important piece of legislation passed.

We are doing many things at the department. One of the things we are doing is investing some $10 million in the guns, gangs, and drugs initiative, which funds community-based programs that seek to help youth resist the lure of gang involvement and illicit drug use.

The Department of Justice is also committed to continuing to play a leadership role in strengthening the justice system through non-legislative means. The department has requested some $3 million in the main estimates for grants and contributions under the justice partnership and innovation program. This program contributes to policy development to ensure that justice remains accessible, efficient, effective, and that it reflects Canadian values.

We're also committed to helping victims better navigate and deal with the criminal justice and correctional systems. To that end, we have increased allocations to the victims fund to, among other things, provide greater financial assistance to those victims who wish to attend national parole board hearings, assist Canadians victimized abroad, provide additional funding to provincial and territorial governments to enhance or develop new services for underserviced victims of crime, and provide resources to the territories to directly assist victims with emergency costs.

In total, we have increased the funding for the federal victim strategy by $52 million over four years. We've also created the independent federal ombudsman for victims of crime to ensure that the federal government lives up to its commitments and obligations to victims of crime and to give victims a strong and effective voice in the criminal justice system.

We also recognize that aboriginal people enter our justice system in disproportionate numbers. As a result, we have renewed our commitment to the aboriginal justice strategy until 2012. We will make an additional investment of $40 million, for a total of $85 million over five years.

The strategy funds programs that provide justice services to more than 400 aboriginal communities across Canada, helping to hold offenders accountable for their actions, increase awareness of victims issues, and promote greater youth connection with aboriginal culture and traditions.

Mr. Chairman, ours is a busy agenda. I think we are doing important work. It's an important component of what we are here to do as members of Parliament.

I thank this committee for its work in moving forward on these justice initiatives. I look forward to more cooperation from this committee. Thank you again.

[The Honourable Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Rob Nicholson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

The short title of this was just pointed out to me. You can refer to it as the Retribution on Behalf of Victims of White Collar Crime Act. It's also known as Bill C-52. This enhances the sentencing provisions for fraud, in particular white collar crime.

The Criminal Code already criminalizes a vast array of what could be called white collar crime, such as bribery, credit card fraud, and forgery, and with the passage of Bill S-4, identity theft, Mr. Chairman. I'm glad to get that one passed. That's an important contribution in this area.

The offence of fraud is the most important offence in our arsenal against white collar crime. Fraud consists of two elements: deception or dishonesty, coupled with an actual loss of money or other items of economic value or merely the risk of such loss. So you can see the breadth and flexibility of this offence is adequate to capture security-related frauds like accounting frauds that overstate the value of securities issuers to shareholders and investors, misstatements about the state of the company, or Ponzi schemes of this sort, which has attracted so much attention recently in the United States and Canada.

The fraud offence is also an effective weapon against other kinds of fraud, such as mass-marketing fraud, real estate or title fraud, home renovation fraud, health care fraud, or other kinds of insurance fraud, tax evasion, and old scams now perpetrated with new technologies.

For too long I believe our justice system has not focused enough on the scam artists who take advantage of the trust of others. With the global economic downturn, as I indicated, massive Ponzi schemes have been revealed. I think that underlines the point we've made here and in the House of Commons and to the public at large that we must send a new, stronger message in this area.

The government has a comprehensive plan for sending that message. As members of the committee, you are all aware that the key aspect of the government's response is Bill C-53, which eliminates accelerated parole under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. This is the responsibility of the Minister of Public Safety, but of course it is a legislative initiative I strongly support.

Another piece of our plan is Bill C-42, which will put an end to conditional sentences for fraudsters, among others.

Let me return to Bill C-52, the Retribution on Behalf of Victims of White Collar Crime Act. To improve the law quickly the government wanted this piece of legislation to be entirely focused. For this reason, the various sentencing measures in this bill are targeted at fraud offenders specifically. The current maximum penalty is 14 years imprisonment, the highest maximum in the code short of life. The maximum sentence is adequate, but we believe that more can be done to ensure that sentences reflect the devastation caused by fraud.

The first amendment in Bill C-52 is a mandatory penalty for fraud in excess of $1 million. Fraud over $1 million is currently a statutory aggravating factor. This bill will convert that aggravating factor into a circumstance that results automatically in a mandatory penalty of at least two years in prison. Any fraud or series of frauds that result in the loss of more than $1 million must necessarily have been the result of a complex, well-organized, well-planned scheme and quite likely supported by additional crimes, like forgery. Any fraud that rises to this level of loss must be considered serious.

Many frauds, as we know, are larger than this, so it's important to be clear that two years is the floor, not the ceiling. The actual sentence imposed for a larger fraud will obviously reflect all the additional blame for the elements of that fraud, many of which are captured by existing aggravating factors under section 380.1 of the code. This bill will supplement those aggravating factors with new ones if the duration, complexity, magnitude, or degree of the planning was significant; if the offence had a significant impact on the victim, given their personal circumstances; if the offender failed to comply with applicable regulatory or licensing regimes; or if the offender concealed or destroyed relevant records.

All of these factors highlight, in one way or another, conduct or results that are completely unacceptable to Canadians. The new aggravating factors, in conjunction with the existing ones, will be applied by sentencing courts to arrive at a just sentence on the particular facts of each case.

Another new measure is the introduction of a prohibition order that can be part of the sentence. The Criminal Code has several prohibition orders in place that are designed to help prevent offenders from reoffending. One such example is the order that is often made against a person convicted of a number of child sexual offences. The order, for instance, could prohibit them from, among other things, working in schools or other places where they would be in a position of trust or authority over young people.

Along the same lines, this bill will enable the court to order that the convicted offender be prohibited from having control over or authority over another person's money or real or valuable securities--up to life. Breaching this prohibition order will itself be an offence.

Other aspects of Bill C-52 focus on improving the responsiveness of the justice system to the needs of victims. It contains provisions designed to encourage the use of restitution orders in fraud cases. The Criminal Code currently enables judges to order offenders to pay restitution to victims in appropriate circumstances. Restitution may be ordered to help cover monetary losses incurred by victims, among other things as a result of the loss of property caused by a crime. Bill C-52 would require judges to consider restitution in all cases in which an offender is found guilty of fraud. If a judge decides not to make a restitution order, he or she would have to give reasons for declining to do so.

The bill would require a judge, before imposing a sentence on an offender, to inquire of the crown whether reasonable steps had been taken to provide victims with an opportunity to indicate whether they are seeking restitution. This is designed to ensure that sentencing does not take place before victims have had a chance to indicate that they would like to seek restitution from the offender, as well as allow time for victims to establish their monetary losses.

The bill contains provisions aimed at encouraging courts to consider the impact that fraud can have, not only on individuals but also on groups and communities. The Criminal Code currently requires courts, when sentencing an offender, to consider a victim impact statement describing the harm done to or the loss suffered by a victim of the offence. Canadian courts have already in previous cases considered impact statements made on behalf of a community.

This bill would explicitly allow courts to consider a statement by a person on a community's behalf describing the harm done to or the losses suffered by the community when imposing a sentence on an offender found guilty of fraud. A community impact statement would allow a community to express publicly, and to the offender directly, the loss or harm that has been suffered in order to allow the community to begin a rebuilding and healing process.

Mr. Chairman, those are the major elements of this bill. I look forward to the speedy passage of this important piece of legislation.

Thank you.

Justice

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Mr. Speaker, we know that organized crime is flourishing with the advancement of modern technology and Canadians also recognize the violence associated with it.

Our government has implemented a comprehensive approach to combatting organized crime and gangs in this country. For two years, we have fought the opposition to pass identity theft legislation that will give police the tools they need to fight this lucrative activity.

I am pleased that our government's Bill S-4 has received royal assent and will soon be the law of the land. Could the Minister of Justice tell the House what this will mean for Canadians?

[Francis Brabant]

Certainly we did welcome Bill S-4, concerning identity theft. I don't think we were alone. I think the Privacy Commissioner....

Again, yes, there's this problem with false identities, but facilitators are normally persons who have true identities.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I thank the witnesses for being here this afternoon.

Like Mr. Ménard, I would like this discussion to continue all day, but I only have four and a half minutes.

I will take another half-minute to comment on Mr. Rathgeber's point, Mr. Chairman, to point out that I think in addition to deterrence it is quite a reasonable proposition that the legislature might distinguish between the gravity of offences by way of minimum sentences for the purpose of instilling confidence in the justice system and for the purpose of recognizing the concerns of victims. I think that those justifications, in addition to deterrence, give the legislature a right to distinguish between the gravity of offences.

However, my questions are for inspectors Joyal and Morin. I note the concerns that both of you have presented regarding front men or facilitators. I'm not sure if I got the expression right, les hommes de paille.

You may recall that Bill S-4, which is currently before Parliament, addresses certain items regarding false identification--that is, obtaining and possessing identity information with the intent to use it deceptively, dishonestly, or fraudulently; unlawfully possessing or trafficking in government-issued identity documents; and forgery offences in relation to those things.

I have two questions. First, will those provisions regarding false identity begin to make a little dent in this question of facilitators or front men? Second, apart from facilitation by way of false identities, can you suggest any provisions that might legislatively assist you in dealing with real people or people with real identities who are laundering or otherwise facilitating organized crime?

Perhaps I'll start with Inspector Morin and then ask Inspector Joyal to comment.

Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I will proceed in the same order in which my colleague presented his questions.

We will continue today with our government's justice program because this is a justice week. We will be starting with our latest edition, Bill C-52, the retribution on behalf of victims of white collar crime bill.

That bill will be followed by Bill C-42,, the conditional sentencing legislation; Bill C-46, the investigative powers legislation; Bill C-47, the technical assistance for law enforcement legislation; Bill C-43, legislation to strengthen Canada's corrections system; Bill C-31, modernizing criminal procedure legislation; and Bill C-19, the anti-terrorism act.

All of these bills are still at second reading, but members can see from the long list that we do have many pieces of legislation to debate and hopefully move through the legislative process.

We will continue with these law and order bills tomorrow and next week when we return from the weekend. As is the normal practice, we will give consideration to any bills that are reported back from committee as well.

On the issue of an allotted day, Wednesday, October 28 shall be the next allotted day.

We will then resume consideration of the government's judges legislation on Thursday following that opposition day.

As my hon. colleague from across the way mentioned, speaking of our justice agenda, I should add that I was extremely pleased to see that despite the Liberals' best efforts to try to gut the bill, it was passed in the other place. For those who are not aware, there were 30 Liberal senators in the other place at the time when they were voting on those amendments. All of them voted for the amendments that would have gutted that legislation. Fortunately, the Conservatives in the other place were sufficient in number to defeat those amendments and actually pass Bill C-25, the truth in sentencing legislation. It actually received royal assent earlier today.

I would like to thank my hon. colleagues, the Conservative senators, for all the good work they did in pushing that bill forward and for all the good work they are doing in pushing forward other legislation.

The House dealt with Bill S-4, the legislation to crack down on identity theft. It was passed and received royal assent as well today.

[Ralph Goodale, Liberal, Wascana, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the government House leader his plans for the work program in the House for the rest of this week and next week in particular.

I wonder if he is in a position today to designate the next allotted day that will come along in the normal series.

Just on one point of absolute clarity, I would note that the Senate finished yesterday with Bill C-25, which is the bill dealing with the two-for-one remand issue. The bill as it emerged from the Senate is in exactly the form passed by the House. I would note that the Senate took one-half as many sitting days to deal with the bill as did the House of Commons, so the Senate moved rather quickly on the matter.

I would also note that Bill S-4 on identity theft was also done.

I wonder if the minister could confirm that royal assent has already been given to both of these bills.

[The Acting Speaker, Denise Savoie]

Order, please. I have the honour to inform the House that a communication has been received as follows:

Rideau Hall

Ottawa

October 21, 2009

Mr. Speaker:

I have the honour to inform you that the Honourable Thomas Cromwell, Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, in his capacity as Deputy of the Governor General, signified royal asset by written declaration to the bills listed in the schedule to this letter on the 21st day of October, 2009, at 5:36 p.m.

Yours sincerely,

Sheila-Marie Cook

Secretary to the Governor General

The schedule indicates the bills assented to were Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), and Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (limiting credit for time spent in pre-sentencing custody).

Resuming debate. The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. I should advise him that he will have not quite 10 minutes and may continue after question period.

Ending Conditional Sentences for Property and Other Serious Crimes Act

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have already given my opinion on this subject. I think that they are dragging this out because they think it is a politically smart thing to do, that it will win them votes, and that they will win more votes by taking an extremist stand than by being reasonable and trying to get people to understand.

It is odd that, in this case, we have not been told what the provincial attorneys general think, because all offenders who are sent to prison under this legislation will be sent to provincial prisons. In fact, conditional sentences apply only to sentences shorter than two years.

I think this is all for the purpose of an election. For example, why did it take them so long to introduce Bill S-4? It was already being considered by the previous Liberal government. But it is now 2009, and they have been in power since 2006. If they had asked us, we would have told them we supported it. And we did support it.

Criminal Code

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I never said that the privacy commissioner was against Bill S-4. I am trying to find what the commissioner said, which was essentially that it is not enough. What she said was “That's why I think we should look at civil sanctions that are very easy to prove and easy for citizens—”. That is what she said.

The Bloc Québécois recognizes that Bill S-4 is necessary. We will vote in favour of this bill because it fills some major gaps. It is also important to note that the privacy commissioner said it is not enough. It is crucial to plug the holes and identify offences in the Criminal Code in order to stop certain practices, such as copying credit cards in corner stores. That must be done.

Many other things could be done much more easily and understandably using civil procedures, which would involve the provincial governments and Quebec.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's contribution to the debate quite carefully, especially the part regarding the Privacy Commissioner's comment regarding small claims court and civil remedies being more appropriate than amendments to the Criminal Code.

I know the Privacy Commissioner and I spoke to her about the bill. I am a member of the justice committee. I would like the member to acknowledge that on May 28 Ms. Stoddart came out in favour of Bill S-4. In fact, she said, “We are pleased to see that the government is taking action on the growing problem of identity theft”.

I would like an acknowledgement that the chief commissioner of privacy for Canada is in favour of the bill.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise this afternoon to address Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

Like my colleagues reminded the House this morning, Bill S-4 on identity theft must not be confused with the attempt made by the Conservatives to steal the government's identity by issuing cheques with the Conservative Party's logo and colour. It is not quite the same thing, although there may be some similarity. We will look at the definitions later on and perhaps we will find that the Conservative members have indeed committed criminal offences.

As my colleague for Laval pointed out, if it turns out that it is indeed a criminal offence, government members might want to include a minimal sentence. But let us be serious, I want to talk about identity theft.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), be read the third time and passed.

CINAR

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a second falsehood, because I was here this morning to say that the Bloc supported Bill S-4.

Yesterday, the federalist parties refused to allow the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to begin an investigation into the CINAR affair. But in recent weeks, a number of new facts have surfaced. Former RCMP officers spoke out about interference in their investigation. A court confirmed the allegations made by Claude Robinson about front men. CINAR itself admitted committing fraud against Telefilm Canada.

By refusing to reopen the CINAR case, does the government realize that, just like the Liberals and the NDP, it has no credibility when it claims to be going after white-collar crimes?

Criminal Code

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to congratulate the hon. member for Laval for her excellent presentation on identity theft. This is an extremely serious problem that has existed for a long time. It seems as though identity theft is now rampant, not only in Quebec, Canada and North America, but all over the world.

My colleague used an analogy that may sound like a joke, namely the identity theft by the Conservatives who steal the government's identity when they present cheques.

I wonder if she could elaborate on this type of identity theft. Would it be covered by Bill S-4, and could it be deemed to be a criminal issue?

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to continue this debate concerning Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), and to follow the brilliant speech by my colleague from Repentigny.

My question about my colleague’s age was not without a point. He is 22, and I am 52. So there are 30 years separating us. I am going to tell my story. I also want to say that the Bloc Québécois is a party with a good balance between the generations. Obviously, that is to the advantage of the Quebeckers who elect us. There is a good ratio between men and women, one that we need to improve. We must always work to increase women’s participation in our political parties. And there is a good balance among the different age groups in the representatives of the Bloc Québécois.

Why did I stress that question? In his reply, my colleague from Repentigny told us about his experience with a cloned debit card. At a very young age, I also had my identity stolen, as I discovered several years later. The mistake made by the people who wanted to steal my identity was that at the time they did it I was a full-time student. I did not have the necessary income. Obviously, they found themselves facing the harsh reality of someone who was not a person of means.

Fifteen years ago, when I applied for a credit report—Equifax or TransUnion do it free of charge—I wanted to know how my credit was and how those firms regarded me. When I received the results, I realized that a name that was not mine appeared on my credit record. I took the necessary steps to ask those firms why there was a name that was not mine. They told me a credit application had been made in that person’s name—which was not my name—and that the person had my social insurance number, my birth date and all the information needed. They had had to add that person’s name to my credit record for my whole life. Why? Because one application was made. At the time, given that the application was excessive, since I had no income, I had not even been informed or contacted. That may be because I had left to study outside Canada. That was probably why. I had not even been aware of it, but 30 or 35 years ago some people had got hold of my personal information, probably from my university applications. That is what we figured out at the time. Those people had got hold of my registration form and, for one reason or another, had thought I was wealthy. There are not just young people at universities. The average age of people at university is between 35 and 40 years, depending on the university. Someone had tried to commit this fraud against me.

Identity theft is not new. We must understand that. Young people too must understand that. I put this question to my colleague from Repentigny. The sites where we give our credit card numbers are not secure just because they are on the Internet. Once the information is there, thieves can get information on us. Inevitably, the result is terrible. We are faced with debt that is not ours. Credit cards are stolen. My colleague was lucky, because he says his bank very quickly realized what had happened and that he was reimbursed for the money taken from his account. Others are less lucky. It is a tough situation.

That is why a measure like Bill S-4 is important. The Bloc supports this bill. Today we are taking the time required to explain why to our viewers. Bills are often passed very quickly. People learn about them through a paragraph in the media. Not all bills make the headlines in the media. Bill S-4 is very important because it aims to fight identity theft, the collection and unauthorized use of personal information usually for criminal purposes.

It is important we take the time to understand identity theft. It is the act of deliberately taking the identity of another person, generally with the aim of committing fraud, such as accessing the funds of the person or committing an offence or an anonymous crime. Nearly all of these definitions refer to the illegal use of the personal information of another individual.

This personal information is obtained in various ways from direct but not necessarily illegal means, such as from rummaging in the garbage, to highly perfected phishing techniques. Experts provided definitions of other ways to obtain personal information such as theft of identity cards or credit cards, redirecting mail, pretexting—claiming to be authorized to gather information, hacking into computer data bases, using skimming devices to gather information off credit cards or debit cards. Stealing PIN numbers consists in looking over a person's shoulder as they enter their PIN or other information at an automated teller machine.

Obviously, the importance of this must be understood. I know that all of the banks are running campaigns to stop people from giving out their PINs. They must be discouraged from doing so. There are people who do not use a banking machine as easily as others. Young people are more capable. I personally at 52 have been using them for six or seven years, but there are people who have a harder time dealing with these electronic money dispensing boxes.

Some people take longer, and when you take longer others have the chance to have a look. So care must be taken. We must make sure that the people behind us are far enough away. There should be no hesitation in asking them to move back in order to enter the PIN number. Some people, if they go too quickly, may make a mistake and have to start over. This does not help those waiting. So we can say we will take the time we need to enter our information and ask people to step back. If we go too quickly, we have to start over and this does not make things easier for the next person.

Often in the lineups at ATMs, the problem is that people are in a hurry and people behind us in the line try to pressure us. We should then take the time to say, “I am going too fast, you are pressuring me. I will probably make a mistake and it certainly will not go any faster then”. If the person still insists, it may well mean that he is trying to steal our PIN. There are people who are experts in stealing PINs, people who pressure us to try to influence us and maybe move closer to us. That is how they get our PINs.

There are other ways as well, such as the inadequate disposal of documents. Machines can be bought, such as paper shredders. It is important to do this. The first machines cut paper into strips, but experts could re-assemble it. Now there are new versions that do the shredding differently so that it is impossible to reconstitute the document. It is important, therefore, when we have documents at home not to just throw them in the garbage because people can search it and find our information. We should make sure to shred all documents with personal information very carefully, even if they are going straight into the garbage.

There is also the loss or theft of personal computers. These computers are very valuable and should not be left in cars. We should be very conscientious about this because our computers are an easy way to steal our identity.

Someone mentioned redirecting mail. If we get mail about a credit card or are expecting information about one—we have applied for one, or it is being renewed, or we have lost ours and requested another—we should be very aware of the expected arrival date. If we are renewing a credit card or have applied for a new one because ours has been changed or does not work any more, we should be very careful. We are given a date by which to expect the new one. As soon as that date goes by, we should call to ensure that the card was sent. If it was, we should ask for a new one because people can get their hands on mail through devious means and try to gather the information on a credit card or even get the credit card itself.

More and more credit card companies are sending their cards by registered mail. We have to sign to get them. However, not all companies do this. We have to be cautious and always make sure that credit cards and documents with personal information have the proper address and that we take possession of them to ensure that someone else does not get them.

As for illegitimate access to databases, the experts in that are known as hackers. As soon as we notice an unusual problem with our computer, we must be cautious. Detecting hacking is not easy, but there are many kinds of software to do that on the market. We must make sure that our computers are equipped with the latest versions of hacking prevention software because hacking is a way to get personal data.

Bill S-4 would create three new specific offences that would all be subject to five year maximum sentences. Adopting legislation is one way to deter that kind of crime. Another way consists in creating new offences with prison sentences.

Those three new offences are the following. The first one is obtaining and possessing identity information with the intent to use the information deceptively, dishonestly or fraudulently in the commission of a crime. Therefore, the person who obtains or possesses the identity information of another person with the intent to commit a crime exposes himself or herself to the five year maximum sentence.

The second offence is trafficking in identity information. Some persons do not intend to use the information they have stolen but are willing to sell it to another person. We see in the media stories of people, businesses or fraudulent systems that steal the content of databases. The individual who sells that information would also automatically risk a prison sentence.

The third offence is unlawfully possessing or trafficking in government-issued identity documents. Earlier I spoke about the credit cards we may receive in the mail, for which we must check that the promised time frames for receipt are respected. If they are not, calls have to be made. Information that governments send us also has to be included. We do not always know when the government is sending us correspondence. When it sends us a cheque, we are pleased, and usually we appreciate it. When it is a bill or a notice of assessment, we don’t want to know, and what is more, we do not know when it is sending us one. These documents could come into people’s possession. Our social insurance number is often recorded on these documents. Obviously this is very important information for stealing identity. Thus, if certain citizens, with unlawful or illicit purposes, attempt to take possession of or traffic in government-issued identity documents, there would be another maximum term of imprisonment of five years.

And other amendments are being made to the Criminal Code. There is the new offence of redirecting a person’s mail or causing it to be redirected. As I was saying earlier, one method of identity theft is to take possession of credit cards or documents containing our information that are issued by various levels of government.

The redirecting of mail by a person will constitute a new offence, as will possession of a counterfeit Canada Post mail key. We know that mailboxes do not have unbreakable locks. First, they are supplied by the government and are not the latest in anti-theft locks. Thieves have techniques of inserting different gadgets or forging keys. If someone had a key that was not for his own mailbox, that would be a counterfeit.

Additional forgery offences are created, such as trafficking in and possession of forged documents for the purpose of using them. People may look for and find information on our identity, but then they will need to produce documents. If they apply for loans, they have to fill out forms. Using our name, they could falsify income or make false statements on forms. They could apply for a loan using our numbers and our name but change our address to their own. It might also be a case of forged credit cards: new credit cards could be issued with the numbers they obtained. This would then be a criminal offence.

The offence of personation is now designated by the term identity fraud. When referring to the offence of personation, the term identity fraud is used. Furthermore, the meaning of “personating a person” is clarified.

In my case, as I was saying, someone applied for credit a number of years ago. The name of that person is still on my credit history. So, if someone falsely claims to be someone else, that person could be criminally charged. I am currently trying to remove the person's name from my file, but it is impossible. No other applications have been made in the past 25 years. If my social insurance number and my date of birth ever appear on an application it will automatically be denied by the credit companies because that other name is on my file. I have not been able to press criminal charges, but under this bill I would be able to. The offence occurred 25 years ago when it was not illegal. From now on, people who go through a similar experience will be able to press criminal charges.

The offence of possessing instruments for copying credit card data is being added because making credit cards requires a plan and the necessary equipment for copying credit cards. Every person in possession of materials or equipment for copying credit cards could be charged with the criminal offence of identity theft.

The bill also adds a new power that would enable the court to order the offender, as part of the penalty, to make restitution to the victim of identity theft or identity fraud for the expenses associated with rehabilitating their identity, including expenses to replace cards and documents and to correct their credit history. That is important. What is required of a victim of identity theft? Earlier my colleague from Repentigny said that the bank alerted him. He did not suffer any monetary losses, but the fact remains that often people who lose their identity have to replace their cards and file new applications. This takes a lot of time. Often, the time this can take and the money it can cost to file all these applications is rather significant and can cause problems. This could be added up and the criminals could be made to pay.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to take the floor for this interesting debate on Bill S-4. First of all, certain things need to be said. One is that the Criminal Code has always trailed a little behind the social problems that people have experienced, are experiencing and will continue to experience. Having been a criminal lawyer for 30 years, I have seen some changes. Identity theft is the best example. If someone in this House or elsewhere is listening to us and is not aware of the fact, right now you can be prosecuted for a criminal offence if you steal someone’s telex or telegram. As far as I know, the telex and telegram have been long gone from Canada. But they are still in the Criminal Code. There are some pretty anachronistic things in the Criminal Code, which definitely needs to be amended to bring it into step with 21st-century needs, and identity theft is one of them.

For those listening to us, we should explain a little about what constitutes identity theft at present. Today, on October 20, 2009, identity theft means deliberately assuming someone’s identity—not too complicated, so far—or the identity of another person—this is where it gets complicated—generally for the purpose of committing fraud. At the moment, that is what has to be demonstrated. For example, many sections of the Criminal Code refer to forgery and uttering forged documents. The stealing of cheques does not constitute a criminal offence. If I take them and do nothing with them, I am not committing a criminal offence. It becomes criminal only if I use them. Of course, it is a criminal offence to steal someone’s cheques, but if the cheques are not used the offence is less serious. So at present, in the Criminal Code, we have what is called forgery and uttering forged documents, for example, taking a cheque and endorsing it. This used to be a regular occurrence on the first and fifteenth of every month. It was quite flagrant. A person would go to all the mailboxes, collect the cheques, endorse them and cash them. This is what was called forgery and uttering forged documents.

Today this is no longer the case. Why not? Because we have direct deposit. We do business with the federal government, the Quebec government or the government of some other province, and what does the government do? It deposits the money it owes us directly into our bank accounts. Employment insurance is a very good example. The employment insurance benefits to which a person is entitled are deposited directly into their account. And yet, here too there was and still is a theft problem. It is a very serious problem, and I will return to it in a few moments, with some figures. This is a problem that now exists. Someone lines up behind us in the credit union, the Royal Bank, the National Bank or any other bank. He watches us enter our PIN, because everyone now enters a PIN, a personal identification number. So what does this person do? He watches us enter our number and he remembers it, because today people remember numbers. In that way, with a duplicate of your card—procured illegally, of course—he can empty our bank account. That is the identity theft problem.

But that is only a small part of it. People can steal credit cards from the mail, when mail is redirected, for example. They take the mail and then there is false pretence or intrusion into data banks. How often have we seen this in recent months? They use a scanning device to collect the information on credit cards.

What does that mean? Some people were becoming experts. We have to be careful when we hand over our credit cards in a business and an imprint is taken. When it is printed, an imprint of the credit card is taken. Some places, there are three copies. We get the original copy back, the one on top, but there are two other copies underneath. We have to watch those other two copies. An honest merchant will tear up the second part and use the third copy for deposit. Thieves get the imprint from the second part with the help of accomplices in the business. Some people had become so expert that they were able to get the imprint. What do they do once they have the imprint and they know the name of the card owner shopping at the business? They watch the person and note down their personal identification number, their PIN. When they have the PIN, they empty the bank account.

They do not just empty the bank account. The problem is that with the PIN they can get a lot of things. That is why people are told not to give out their social insurance number. Someone who steals your identification cards today, for example your social insurance card, your health insurance card, your driver’s licence, or even your passport, can steal your identity. Those items are worth a fortune.

What does that mean? We do not realize it until someone tells us there are two people with the same name walking around with the same identification. Each one should have different identification. It is like fingerprints: they are supposed to be different. Someone who steals another person’s identification can do a lot of things. They can steal, borrow and defraud.

My former colleague from Hochelaga who is no longer here, Mr. Ménard, drew the government’s attention to this by presenting some revealing figures. It is becoming big business. In 2004, the costs associated with identity theft exceeded $50 billion a year. I repeat: the costs associated with identity theft every year exceeded $50 billion.

In Canada alone, the Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus estimated that in 2002, consumers, banks, credit card companies, stores and other businesses lost $2.5 billion because of identity theft.

In 2006 it got even bigger. PhoneBusters, created in 1993, is an anti-fraud call centre. Generally, we receive the centre’s telephone number with our credit cards. It is often written on the back of the card, but it is best not to just leave it there, because if your card is stolen, that information is not very useful. Put it somewhere else. It is a telephone number to use to report that a credit card has been stolen or that someone is trying to use it. In Ontario and several other places in Canada, PhoneBusters received 7,800 calls reporting identity theft in 2006 alone.

It had therefore become urgent that attention be given to this problem, which causes billions of dollars of losses every year, not just in Canada, not just in Quebec, but everywhere in the world.

When we look at the legislation, we note that the United States started attacking this problem in 1988. In the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights we had an opportunity to hear from a variety of experts on identity theft. It was extremely interesting, and we learned a lot. In terms of insurance, for example, incredible frauds have been committed. We have to find a way to deal with such fraud. How? One way to deal with it is Bill S-4, which concerns identity theft and will amend a number of sections of the Criminal Code. I do not want to list all the sections, but I consider clause 10 very important. The subheading will now be "Identity Theft and Identity Fraud", and it will have an impact on sections 400, 402, 402.1 and so on. The nomenclature will be entirely different.

And what does it involve? I will try to provide a quick list. The new section explains identity theft. It is simply the theft by an individual of a person's name, address, date of birth and written signature, electronic signature or digital signature. I will translate that into plain language for those watching. A written signature is not complicated—that is when we sign. Increasingly—and this is why the bill makes up for dozens of years of lost time—many people authorize an electronic signature. All MPs in this House have what is called an electronic signature, but how many businesses have also established the principle of the electronic signature? If someone steals it, that will be illegal. Obviously, there are social insurance numbers, health card numbers, drivers' license numbers, credit card numbers and debit card numbers as well. For those watching, it is not simply the theft of the plastic card that is dangerous, it is the transmission of the number. How many times do we make calls, visit eBay or do business with someone in a store? We simply give our credit card number over the phone. Is there anyone in this House who has not ordered chicken from St-Hubert barbecue or Checkers or pizza? What do we do? We give our credit card number over the phone. That is becoming very dangerous. We must make sure when the delivery comes that the correct number appears on all the documents we are asked to sign.

The new section 402.1 also includes our passport number, user code, password, fingerprints or voice print, retinal image, iris image and DNA profile. I think this is a good thing the government has done. We are moving forward. We are moving forward in time and are anticipating what is coming.

In 2007, my colleague Réal Ménard from the riding of Hochelaga called for this, and the government responded that it was not necessarily urgent. Today it realizes that it is extremely urgent and that considerable losses have occurred and are still occurring.

There is going to be a new section. Obviously, mere possession of someone's name and address is not illegal, but the definition of identity information in clause 402.1 will apply to a new offence. The bill creates a new hybrid offence that involves the transmission, making available, distribution, selling or offering for sale, or possession of another person’s identity information.

Basically, having someone else's name, address and phone number is okay because we all have that kind of information on our contact lists, no matter which political party we belong to.

But if a person has someone else's social insurance number, personal identification number or credit card number, the prosecutor will assume that he or she obtained these documents illegally and must prove that the accused trafficked in identity information about another person knowing that it would be used to commit a crime based on fraud, deceit and lies.

I believe that the House should vote in favour of this bill. This clause will ensure that any person who takes an individual's information without authorization, illegitimately and illegally, faces the legal consequences.

For the benefit of the House, my colleagues and the people watching us, once wallet and identity theft occurs—say someone steals a woman's purse—it costs the victim around $500 to recover her identity. Getting a new passport, new identification cards, new driver's licence and so on will cost the victim about $500.

But there are worse consequences. It is no secret that some companies investigate individuals. Take Equifax, for example. What does this company do for people? It establishes their credibility, their financial power.

When a business conducts a credit check, it generally contacts a company like Equifax or Crédit Nord-Ouest, which collects, stores and keeps information. Now, when a person's identity is stolen, the incredible effort it takes to notify these companies is completely disproportionate to the crime that has been committed. When someone's belongings are stolen and their identity is used to commit fraud and theft, that honest person will unfortunately have to go through a very long and difficult process to have the poor credit rating removed from his or her file at the credit company.

This extremely important bill is very timely as we enter the 21st century. Identity theft is an insidious crime that destroys a person's identity. Often, people who are victims of identity theft have a very hard time proving that they are not thieves or fraudsters, because someone has used their identity, even though they had no right to do so. That is illegal, and it was high time the government took action.

The question was asked earlier, and I am going to answer it. Companies even testified that they wanted minimum sentences. We objected strongly, and we are going to continue to object strongly to minimum sentences. Why? Because we are going to start by implementing this bill.

I hope that this House will vote quickly in favour of this bill and that it can be implemented very quickly. Once it has been analyzed, then perhaps some thought can be given to revising the potential sentences. But we should let the courts do their job and ensure that anyone who commits such an offence receives a fair and appropriate punishment.

Mr. Speaker, I know that you gave me a signal a few moments ago, so I will just say in closing that we feel it is important that this bill has finally reached this House. We hope it will be passed quickly so that we can implement it.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to indicate to the House my support for Bill S-4, as I think all members of the House have indicated today and previously. I do not recall very much dissent, although some caution is urged in relation to one or two sections of the bill.

The bill has been a long time coming. I guess it is pretty clear on the record that we are at third reading stage. Somebody offered earlier today to expedite its passage but it would be pretty tough to expedite it much faster than the speed at which it is already going. I do not know whether I am the last speaker but at some point today the debate will end, the House will adopt the bill and it will be over. I congratulate all those who wanted to expedite it because they will get their wish.

As members have said, the concept behind the bill has been in the drafting stage for about 10 years. There were complexities that did delay it in the early years. There was a bit of a moving target with respect to personal information. This is an area of evolving legislative activity. I think it was the intention of the original drafters that we get a good definition of what “personal identity information” is, and the bill has a pretty good definition, which I will get to later in my remarks.

I recall going through the bill very carefully at the justice committee one or two Parliaments ago. The bill, however, was always pre-empted by a parliamentary dissolution. It was not that nobody wanted to see it pass. It was always a problem of Parliament ending in a dissolution before the bill was fully passed.

However, there is a section that has created an offence involving the possession of a Canada Post mailbox key. This type of key is the one postal workers use when they distribute and pick up mail on the street. All Canadians are familiar with those big post boxes and those big keys that the postal workers use. I think the original intention was to create an offence for anyone who was in possession, without authority, of one of those keys.

Now, that makes sense. Why did it take us 100 years to get to this point? I am not sure. Maybe it is because the post office always did a pretty good job of keeping control of its keys. However, it has become a problem, which is the basis for this proposed offence. I think this has been expanded to include possession of any key that would open a post box receptacle, which means my post box key and the keys of everyone here. There are probably millions of post box keys across the country.

I think somebody has thought this out, but it is not an offence just to be in possession of somebody else's post box key. There needs to be an intent to use it fraudulently or to commit an offence described in the section. However, had I had such an opportunity at committee, I would have scrutinized very carefully the implications of creating a new offence that made it an offence simply to be in possession, with a fraudulent intention, of something that is so common. I could say that if we are going to make it an offence to possess someone's little mailbox key, then why do we not make it an offence to possess somebody's house key? The house has much more value than a post box. Here we may have unwittingly treaded into a territory that we have not thought through.

However, in any event, it is in the bill and I will not object to it but my gut tells me that down the road, at some point in time, there will be a case and a fact scenario that will raise potential issues with respect to somebody's possession of a simple mailbox key. I am not talking about the big post office key. I am just talking about an ordinary residence or apartment building mailbox key. We all have them.

I am very pleased to see that in the bill we grappled with and nailed by definition the concept of credit card and debit card in a way that would allow police and authorities to clearly identify an offence when it happens. Up to now, a credit card was just a piece of plastic with some information printed on it but we all regard credit cards as something more than that. It is our access to credit, cash or whatever. Up to when we started amending the Criminal Code, that little piece of plastic was just a piece of plastic. The bill, essentially, completes the initiative to place an intrinsic legal value on the information contained on the credit card. Credit and debit cards have magnetic strips with personal information, credit information, digital information and now they also have chips, with who knows how much information, but all intended to better secure the credit realm, if I can put it that way.

Also, the bill gets into the issue of identifying and defining the personal identification number, the PIN, that is a necessary partner to some types of credit or debit access, either person-to-person or machine-person-to-machine. That would be helpful for the police as they carry out investigations. For example, if there is a reason to arrest somebody who is suspected of being involved in a fraud or a crime and that person was in possession of what appeared to be PINs, up to now, those numbers would just be numbers and it is actually not an offence to be in possession of a bunch of numbers. However, if they could be identified as personal identification numbers to be used in association with credit and debit transactions, it is a new offence, and that is a good thing.

Up to now, when there was theft from the mail, the police, authorities and prosecutors always had difficulty trying to figure out who was the owner of the mail when it was stolen. Certainly when it is in the possession of the post office, there were offences dealing with theft from the mail from the post office, but what if the post office had not taken possession of it yet or what if the post office had already delivered it to a residence? After it has been delivered by the post office to a box sitting outside a front door somewhere, is that theft from the mail or is it theft from somebody in the house? What if the name on the letter does not match the name of the owner of the house? These were always problems.

I suppose I could ask why it has taken us 100 years to figure this one out, but the answer is that in the good old days, in the early 1900s, maybe there was not so much theft from the mail. Maybe it was not a big problem. However, the police and prosecutors have identified it now as a weakness in public security. We have managed to clarify that so mail that is sitting delivered to a house, a residence or in a box, not only is the key somewhat protected but so is the mail and that will allow better police enforcement.

I want to raise a concern, as my friend from Windsor—Tecumseh did earlier, about the exemption of public officers from prosecution when they use a forgery technique in their work for public safety.

The exemption is somewhat circumscribed. The alleged offence, and only an alleged offence because it says they are exempt, must be committed for the sole purpose of establishing or maintaining a covert identity for use in the course of the public officer’s duties or employment. As my friend pointed out earlier, the term “public officer” is quite a broad definition. One wonders why this particular exemption could not have been folded into section 25 or subsection 25(1) of the Criminal Code where there are statutory exemptions from prosecution for police or public officers in the course of their duties.

The most common case one thinks of is the work of an undercover police officer who assumes a false identity for the purpose of a covert undercover investigation. Citizens accept that. However, under section 25 of the Criminal Code when a public officer commits an act that would otherwise be a criminal offence, there must be a record of it and a justification for it in writing. The exemption claimed by the officer and agreed to by the police force that he or she is a part of is recorded in the House. A report is introduced in the House every year that describes each and every instance of exemption of a police officer from prosecution when an act is committed that would otherwise be a criminal offence.

One wonders why we would not require this type of exemption in this bill, clause 368.2, to be included in similar reports. Some people will say that there is just too much police and public officer covert activity going on and that instead of having a small volume filed in the House of Commons, the report would be 12 or 24 inches thick. That is possible, which is why I wanted to put it on the record and join my friend who spoke earlier on this as raising a possible concern.

The public should be much more satisfied that the bill has managed to bring in protection for a whole lot of personal identity techniques and information, which I will read for the record. The identity information protected includes: a fingerprint, voice print, retina image, iris image, DNA profile, name, address, date of birth, written signature, electronic signature, digital signature, user name, credit card number, debit card number, financial institution account number, passport number, social insurance number, health insurance number, driver’s licence number or a password.

I wanted to get those on the record because so many people routinely use all of those things. I wanted the record to show that this legislative amendment captured all of those things and gave people at least some protection under the Criminal Code. It does not mean that there will not be thefts of identity. It just means that the code identifies these things as protected items and, if they are stolen, used or misused, the prosecution will be easier and more focused.

Will it deter the bad guys? We do not know. The bad guys will always be out there looking for a chance to steal and plunder, although we hope there are fewer and fewer of them out there, but at least this amendment attempts to capture all of the things we have become used to as personal identity items.

The bill has a sentencing component. I am very pleased it does not engage in this mindless political posturing of throwing the book at those convicted with mandatory minimums. The bill quite properly proposes sentencing ranges for those convicted of these offences. Sometimes it is up to five years, or it is up to 10 years, or it is by indictment or it is by summary conviction, but the sentencing ranges look appropriate.

As we have always done in our Canadian justice system, and in most justice systems in the modern world, the decision making on sentencing is left to informed judges. I wanted to make this point because a number of the criminal law amendment bills we are looking at in this Parliament, and in the previous Parliament, all seem to have as their objective the rewriting of the sentencing regimes. In some naive way the proposers of the bill think that by tweaking the sentencing, we are going to get a safer country. I do not understand this.

I have had a close-up look at the Canadian justice system. I have been privileged to be in the House for many years. I was on the justice committee for 15 years. I had the privilege of seeing the criminal justice system up close, and it was not always pretty. I saw it working reasonably well. It is not like there were never any mistakes.

I cannot accept that by throwing a mandatory minimum sentence into a particular offence, we are suddenly going to have a reduction in the number of offences. The criminals out there, the would-be criminals, the maybe criminals do not know what the sentence is for any particular crime. In fact, I challenge anybody here today, any member of the House, to get up and tell us what the sentence would be for a particular offence, even under this bill. One could not know. The reason is we have provided for sentencing ranges. When people are convicted, they do not know what the sentence will be until the judge finally decides.

If we do not know what the sentence is, how could those would-be criminals out on the streets know what the sentencing would be? In their mind, as I have always seen it, it is binary in reaction to the criminal justice system. Either they are going to get their deterrences, or they are going to get caught or they are not. It is not about what the sentence is. They do not get out their little calculators and calculate what the sentence is before they hop into the car. Their whole view of this is whether they are going to caught. If they think they are going to get caught, they are not going to do it that night. If they think they are not going to get caught, they might.

I do not understand the mentality that urges upon the House that if we suddenly put in a whole bunch of mandatory minimum sentences, all those bad guys will know what the sentence is and they will stop their criminal activity and we will be safer. I just had to get in that sentencing issue.

I am pleased to have had a chance to talk about the bill. It looks like we are going to have ourselves an identity theft bill.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Madam Speaker, the member for Shefford misunderstood. At no point did I propose that we dispose of a bill before the House to prevent those watching on TV from understanding. However, the member for Shefford will agree that there are no new measures in this bill that were not debated during the last Parliament, as part of a bill that was nearly identical to the one before us today.

We have had discussions in the House of Commons standing committee. Debates were held in the Senate over this bill. So, I disagree with the member for Shefford that we must avoid proceeding quickly with Bill S-4. I simply suggested to the other members that we could quickly pass the final form of this bill in order to move on to other bills. Viewers at home have had plenty of time to understand this bill, and many documents were brought before the parliamentary committees, either during this Parliament or the previous one. This is not a new measure. I think that this bill should be passed, and I think we should do so as quickly as reasonably possible in this House.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Edmonton—St. Albert for the speech he made a few moments ago.

I work with the member for Edmonton—St. Albert on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. He is very much interested in improving our Criminal Code and strengthening measures to protect the most vulnerable. The bill before us today, Bill S-4, deals with identity theft.

I do not intend to speak at length because the Liberal Party supports Bill S-4, which was in fact introduced in the previous Parliament. The bill was first introduced in the House of Commons, but this time around, the government introduced it in the Senate. We have discussed it in the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and we believe these are reasonable and appropriate measures to address a problem that increasingly affects our seniors.

I had the opportunity to speak this morning with a man from my riding, Roger Dorion. He represents a group of francophone seniors. They are obviously very aware of the harm that identity theft can cause to a person. Those who traffic in stolen identities or try to steal identities or mail often choose seniors as their victims.

The bill basically sets out three new criminal offences to deal with identity theft. As my colleague from Edmonton—St. Albert noted, there are additional and new provisions around being in possession of stolen identity documents, not only having to use those documents for a further criminal purpose, but simply being in possession, for example, of redirected or stolen mail or a key to open a mailbox that is not one's own. At the root of identity theft, we often find tampering with mail. The consequences can be devastating.

The new offences are all subject to a five year maximum sentence. We think that is an appropriate balance to send a message to those sometimes involved in organized crime who think that identity theft represents an economic gain for them at devastating consequences to the victims of these crimes.

On behalf of the Liberal Party, I am giving the House of Commons today an opportunity to dispose of this bill as quickly as possible. We do not intend to start a long debate. We already discussed this bill in the previous Parliament.

I have spoken to our House leader about this and it is our hope that perhaps while other parties are speaking on Bill S-4, we might find a mechanism, by unanimous consent, to pass this bill this morning at report stage and third reading. It is a bill that has been around for a long time and we think there are other important criminal justice measures on the order paper today that we are anxious to debate and to move forward expeditiously.

From our perspective, any measures that can be taken by the government or other parties to ensure that this bill passes this morning or later today, including the third reading stage, the Liberal Party will be very co-operative.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Madam Speaker, the issue of reverse onus is problematic. As the member will undoubtedly know, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides that an accused charged with any Criminal Code offence is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty and that the crown bears the onus of establishing each and every element of the offence.

The short answer to his question is that there was no serious discussion about reversing the onus with respect to Bill S-4. However, the member should be happy to know from a reading of Bill S-4 that simple possession is an offence. There is no longer a requirement that the possession be for some further unlawful act or for the purpose of committing a fraud, impersonation or some other Criminal Code offence. Possession of someone else's identity is an offence in and of itself.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the third reading of Bill S-4, which would amend the Criminal Code to address the growing problem of identity theft. Bill S-4 has been reported back from the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights without amendment.

As the witnesses who testified before the committee agreed, this legislation is urgently needed. The new and constantly evolving technologies that dramatically improve our lives are being exploited by enterprising criminals.

Identity theft is growing, both in the number of incidents and in the amount of losses to consumers, retailers, service providers, financial institutions, and also governments.

However, as the witnesses and experts also made very clear, identity theft is not just about money. There is a great deal of fear among Canadians that their identities are being exploited and being abused by criminals. When identity information is used in the course of a fraud, a travel-related offence or another offence, the ramifications for the victim can be severe. Victims of identity theft suffer psychological harm and feelings of being violated. In extreme cases, Canadians can lose their life savings, and sometimes even their homes, or they can be left with a poor credit rating, based on the criminal acts of others.

Long after these victims spend their time and energy clearing their good names, there remain lingering feelings of vulnerability and loss of control over their lives and anxiety for years to come over whether the nightmare is even over. The fear of having their identities misused again at some unknown point in time in the future is a constant for these victims.

Police are increasingly seeing links between identity theft and organized crime, and even terrorism. Organized criminals use other people's identities to camouflage their own identities and to commit crimes to generate large profits. We are seeing identity information collected in one place and instantaneously shipped over the Internet to criminal gangs in other countries for manipulation. The criminals are getting ahead of us in their level of organization and sophistication.

RCMP witnesses who testified before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights explained that the key components of Bill S-4 are new offences that would close legislative gaps. Right now, criminals can collect, possess and traffic in identity information for criminal purposes, but they may not be guilty of any crime. While the ultimate criminal or fraudulent use of other people's identities is clearly criminal under a variety of offences, such as fraud or personation, Bill S-4 would directly target the early phases of identity theft operations which today may fall through the legal cracks. The new offences contained in Bill S-4 would allow the police to take action and lay charges even before a fraud is committed or a person is impersonated or someone unlawfully crosses the border with phony documents.

As the RCMP witnesses testified before committee, Bill S-4 would bring our laws one step closer to protecting not only individual Canadians but also the integrity of the Canadian economy.

Other aspects of Bill S-4 would clarify and complement existing offences in the Criminal Code. For instance, in addition to existing offences regarding the protection of the mail and Canada Post operations, new offences would be added to address redirecting mail and stealing mail from a mailbox, both of which are known techniques used by identity thieves to gather information.

As I already mentioned, new offences concerning the collection and possession of identity information are included in the bill, as is the new offence of trafficking in identity information. The offence of personation already prohibits the fraudulent use of another person's identity, and this would now be renamed “identity fraud”.

The idea here is for the criminal law to clearly reflect the full sequence of identity crime activities. Identity theft, the collecting and possessing of identity information, is followed by trafficking in identity information, which is then followed by identity fraud, the actual fraudulent use of the identity information.

Bill S-4 would also extend the restitution provisions in the Criminal Code to help victims recover some of the costs they must bear to obtain new documents and otherwise rehabilitate their identities if they are victimized. This measure would, hopefully, go some way toward remedying the damage done to Canadians who struggle to cope with having lost control of their identities.

Other vital aspects of Bill S-4 are the narrowly tailored exemptions relating to the manufacture and use of false documents for use by undercover police officers. One exemption permits people who make false documents to be shielded from liability if they do so in good faith and at the request of a police agency or government department. The other exemption permits peace officers to make and use false identity documents without criminal liability solely where they do so for the purpose of maintaining a covert identity.

In the House, in committee and in the Senate some concerns were raised about the exemptions because they do not contain an oversight or accountability mechanism. The government considers it entirely appropriate to grant these exemptions as the making and use of false documents for covert investigations as fundamental to effective law enforcement. The exemptions are very narrow. They do not permit anyone to commit fraud, identity theft, impersonation or any offence outside of a few narrow forgery offences.

Peace officers can use false documents only for the purpose of maintaining their covert identity. They will fall outside the scope of the exemption if they use the forged documents for any other purpose. The government considers these exemptions to be close parallels to the exemption provided to police for the carrying of a firearm. There is no oversight required for each occasion on which a police officer carries his or her weapon. The law simply makes it clear that officers may carry firearms whenever they are on the job.

Similarly, requiring oversight for each instance in which an undercover agent makes or uses a false identity document to support his or her covert identity would be administratively burdensome, if not impossible. More important, as there is no conceivable harm that can come to Canadians by these limited exemptions, oversight would serve no conceivable useful purpose. The government is confident that the exemptions in Bill S-4 are both necessary and appropriate.

It bears mentioning that in the Senate the legal and constitutional affairs committee amended this bill to put in a five year review of the legislation. The government is pleased that the legislation will be reviewed so that parliamentarians can consider how effective the law has been at helping to reduce and prevent identity fraud. That evaluation will give us an opportunity to appreciate whether any additional amendments or any other improvements should be made to better protect Canadians from identity crime.

Bill S-4 would not immediately bring an end to identity crime. No piece of legislation alone would be capable of doing that. Still, Bill S-4 is a giant step forward and would provide law enforcement in this country with some tools that are currently missing from its toolbox. Witnesses have been clear that Bill S-4 is urgently needed.

As technology advances, so too must criminal law and the Criminal Code. I, therefore, encourage all hon. members to pass this legislation without further delay.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), as reported (without amendment) from the committee.

Justice

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Mr. Speaker, you will be pleased to see that the member for Yukon has rejoined this side of the House.

When the government is in difficulty, whether it is allegations around the partisan handing out of infrastructure money or government cheques with Conservative logos appearing at ceremonies, its initial reaction is to push the reset button and pretend that there is a great crisis with respect to obstruction of justice legislation.

That is not true. Tomorrow, for example, we will be discussing Bill S-4 in the House, the identity theft bill. The only identity that appears to have been misappropriated may have been the Government of Canada's identity at recent cheque presentations. The government has had some difficulty with that.

The minister knows very well, for example, that we will support a bill strengthening the Criminal Code in the case of white collar criminals and economic crimes. As to preventing those who are guilty of massive fraud from carrying out their sentence at home, we will support the government in order to remove this part of the Criminal Code, something we called for several weeks ago.

The Minister of Justice looks for examples where the opposition has obstructed legislation with respect, for example, to removing the faint hope clause for those convicted of murder. We supported that legislation and we look forward to seeing the minister in committee this afternoon to continue to expedite that bill and pass it as quickly as possible.

With regard to restricting conditional sentences, or what has been known as house arrest, the minister knows that we support that legislation. We have in fact called on the government to strengthen that legislation and remove what is becoming an increasing practice of assigning conditional sentences, because we think the public finds that is no longer appropriate. The government is looking for an artificial crisis where one does not exist.

The minister can rest assured that his bills will be passed as quickly as possible with the cooperation of the Liberal opposition in this House.

Justice and Human Rights

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 11th report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In accordance with the order of reference of Wednesday, June 17, your committee has considered Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), and agreed on Wednesday, October 7, to report it without amendment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

So with that change the amendment would read that Bill S-4 in clause 10 be amended by replacing lines 38 through 41 on page 7 with the following. The rest would remain the same.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I'll gladly give you a ruling on that.

Again, just to clarify, we're dealing with amendment 4127692. The amendment seeks to amend section 380 of the Criminal Code.

Marleau and Montpetit state on page 654 that “an amendment is inadmissible if it amends a statute that is not before the committee or a section of the parent Act unless it is specifically being amended by a clause of the bill”.

Since section 380 of the Criminal Code is not being amended by Bill S-4, it would be out of order to consider such an amendment. That would be my ruling. The ruling is not debatable, but it can be challenged. I'm in your hands.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll start off by saying that I need to move an amendment. I caught the drafting just before I came into the committee today and there was an error in it. Perhaps I'll give an overview.

I'm attempting to limit the use of this section to two categories of people. One is a police force. That's what is not in here. That should have stayed in, that any police force can ask for a document to be created, presumably to create a false person for investigative purposes. Clearly a police force should have that authority, so that should remain in there. The second category is the two ministers: the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.

I have to admit that I didn't pick this up until fairly late in the process of our review of Bill S-4, but I cannot understand why we would be extending immunity to such a large category of people. As clause 7 stands now, as proposed, it's all police forces, and I don't have a problem with that as it's obviously necessary, but then it goes on to include the Canadian Forces, with no limit.

You can understand that within the Canadian Forces certainly their intelligence units and their military police, quite frankly, might need it, but it's not limited to that. It's all Canadian Forces. The way I read it, and I don't think there's any way of reading it but this way, the average soldier, a private, could go into the office in Thunder Bay where we register our birth certificates and ask to have a birth certificate created and they would have to comply.

It then goes beyond that and includes all federal government agencies and all provincial government agencies. I cannot understand why we would extend that kind of authority. It's just so ripe for abuse.

This clause is needed for the purposes of allowing our police forces, our intelligence services, to create false identities in order for those individuals operating in those fields to be able to conduct their normal investigative role. Why would we extend this?

I was thinking yesterday that the Children's Aid Society could walk in and ask for that kind of documentation to be prepared, and the department that creates those documents would have to prepare them.

Similarly, if you were to go to one of the credit card companies and say that you needed to have this document created and ask them to give you a credit card in a person's name, the private sector would have to do that. Municipalities would have to change identification of ownership of buildings if that were asked for, and it could be asked for by a huge number of people the way the clause is written.

As I said earlier, with this amendment I've tried to keep the police forces involved, obviously, but then move that authority to the two ministers at the federal level, who would obviously be able to delegate that authority to the appropriate people within their departments.

[Tamir Israel, Staff Lawyer, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic]

We would like to thank you, Chair and honourable members, for inviting us to speak before you today on this important issue.

My name is Tamir Israel. I am staff counsel with CIPPIC. With me is David Fewer, our acting director. We apologize for not providing you with a brief of our position today.

CIPPIC is a legal clinic based in the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law. Much of our mandate involves addressing the legal and policy concerns that arise from new technologies and specifically from the ever-increasing availability of private and personal information in electronic formats.

For a long time, we have been concerned with the many facets of identity theft and have researched legal and policy approaches to that problem. This work has resulted in, among other things, a public-private multidisciplinary project funded by the Ontario Research Network for Electronic Commerce, ORNEC, and a series of six working papers available on our website at www.cippic.ca. These cover most aspects of the issue.

We will be releasing a final white paper later this year, updating and summarizing our work on this issue and making specific recommendations for law and policy reform needed to address identity theft in a comprehensive manner.

We would like to point out that identity theft is a very serious phenomenon with specific impacts on individuals and society at large. You've heard that ID theft costs our economy $2 billion annually and that this is a conservative number.

There is an associated loss of confidence that is much more difficult to quantify, but equally serious. We have seen figures estimating that individual victims in Canada spend approximately $164 million of their own money and over 18 million hours annually just addressing the fallout from having their identities stolen, just to re-establish their identities.

In addition to this social and individual financial cost, there is also the invasiveness of such offences. People who have their personal information or identities taken from them for such fraudulent purposes often feel violated. People have told us that victims of ID theft often exhibit feelings similar to those seen in victims of home burglaries. There is serious psychological harm here, as well as the financial costs.

We feel that the magnitude and nature of these harms calls for a criminal component as part of any response to the problem of ID theft.

Our study of Bill S-4 has convinced us that it is well-tailored to address the specific and fairly well-documented problems raised by identity theft in the criminal sphere. It manages to provide police with the tools they need in this sphere to address these problems, while avoiding the problems of overbreadth. It does so while managing to maintain flexibility and technical neutrality. The reason it is able to do this is that it directly addresses the specific issues posed by identity theft and does not overreach in that respect.

We're here today to say that we support this bill and would gladly try to answer any outstanding questions or concerns you might have on it. We've been paying attention to your committee hearings and we've noticed that some have been raised.

But we'd also like to remind the government, in brief, that its job with respect to identity theft is not done. ID theft requires a comprehensive response. This bill largely and effectively addresses the criminal portion of this response. In addition, the government's Bill C-27, which is also currently in committee, takes important regulatory steps that will deter a great deal of ID theft activity.

But more reforms are essential to address prevention and to help individual victims deal with the problems that identity theft raises for them. Many of these additional reforms are beyond the scope of a criminal bill such as this one, and we would not want to delay the implementation of Bill S-4. However, we have your attention, so we would like to point out to you the ways in which the Criminal Code can be improved to better accommodate the needs of victims. The victim restitution provisions in clause 11 of this bill will go some way to doing that, but we feel that more can be done.

We have suggested in the past and do so here again that it would be helpful to add provisions to the Criminal Code giving victims the right to local police reports. We have found from our research that this helps victims address jurisdictional issues.

What often happens is that a resident of one city, let's say Ottawa, will have their identity stolen or the ID fraud will manifest in another city, let's say Edmonton. The victim will be directed to Edmonton police, who will have jurisdiction. The local police force will generally refuse to open an additional file because they don't like to investigate claims committed in other jurisdictions. Although I note in defence of Ottawa that we were told the OPS in particular is willing to do this, most other police forces will not.

This is a serious problem. ID theft often requires immediate action, and for an Ottawa denizen to have to contact Edmonton before a file is opened, that takes a lot of time. In the meantime, they are having credit problems.

On the other hand, ID theft also has long-term, recurring ramifications, and it simplifies matters a great deal for victims to have local police as their point of contact for any investigation. The police can then forward the investigation to a more appropriate jurisdiction, but they should remain the point of contact. It should be clarified that this applies to victims, even if the financial institution in question absorbed all the financial harm in a particular instance.

In addition, we have heard that police reports often don't contain a great deal of information. They do not even state that the offence being investigated is fraud. This means they're not very helpful to victims, in and of themselves, if they're trying to vindicate themselves with persistent creditors or with Equifax or anybody else.

To remedy this, other jurisdictions have provided, within their criminal statutes, a right to a judicial determination of factual innocence from a court of law, once an investigation is successfully completed. We point you to section 530.6 of California’s Penal Code, if you would like guidance on provisions of this nature either now or in the future. There are other examples from other jurisdictions that can be found in our working papers on our website. A broader range of suggestions is available in our working papers as well and will be collected and updated in the white paper we intend to release shortly.

We invite any questions on the issues we've raised here, on any outstanding concerns you may have with respect to the current bill that have been raised in the past hearings before you, or on any other steps that can be taken to alleviate identity theft.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I call to order meeting 37 of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. You have before you the agenda for today. We have a number of matters to deal with.

First, we have one last organization as a witness in our review of Bill S-4, an act to amend the Criminal Code in regard to identity theft and related misconduct. After hearing our witnesses, we'll move to clause-by-clause consideration of the bill.

Once we've completed clause-by-clause, we'll deal with Monsieur Ménard's motion, if he wishes to, on the Cinar case.

Once we've completed that discussion, we'll move to an in camera meeting where we'll consider a draft report on declaring certain groups criminal organizations. That was Monsieur Ménard's former motion, and we've completed that study now.

So let's move forward with our last witnesses on Bill S-4. We have with us the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, represented by David Fewer and Tamir Israel.

Welcome to you both. I think you understand the process here. One of you has 10 minutes to present, and then we'll open the floor to questions from our members.

Mr. Fewer or Mr. Israel, do you want to start?

[Wendy Rinella]

My understanding of the case is that Mr. Wirik did not obtain the mortgage discharge. It was a failure in terms of executing his office. That's what he was eventually charged for. So you're absolutely correct, I don't think there would have been any impact from Bill S-4 on this type of fraud. I think he was disbarred in 2002, and it finally came to trial and he was charged in 2009. In the interim he ran a pet food store, so he had a seven-year reprieve in which to develop his defence, which is very unfortunate. That's the one thing that we'd like to see: more effective prosecution of these heinous crimes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I think we're at the end.

Just to comment, I'm from British Columbia, and you're correct in noting that the largest land title fraud was committed in British Columbia. Of course Mr. Wirik and, I believe, Mr. Gill are both being prosecuted under the current Criminal Code provisions.

I'm a little bit concerned about your suggestions about making changes that go perhaps outside the scope of Bill S-4. I tend to concur with my colleague Mr. Woodworth that Bill S-4 is very specific in its scope. I'm not sure the fraud that occurred in British Columbia necessarily would have been more easily prosecuted even with Bill S-4 in place. As you know, in that case it was collusion between Mr. Gill and a lawyer, Mr. Wirik. In that case, of course, it was the Law Society of British Columbia that actually paid all the victims and in fact had to levy very significant sums on an annual basis against the members of the law society.

So do you want to comment on whether Bill S-4 would have made any difference in the Wirik and Tarsem Gill case?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I call the meeting to order.

This is meeting number 36 of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Today is Monday, October 5, 2009. Just as a note, today's meeting is being televised.

You have before you the agenda for today. We have two matters to deal with. During the first hour, we'll begin a review of the Canadian Human Rights Act, more particularly section 13. We also have two witnesses appearing on that matter. And just so you know, during the second hour we'll return to our review of Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct). We have one witness appearing on that bill.

Once again, I remind everyone in this room to please turn off their BlackBerrys or set them to vibrate. We want to make sure there are no disturbances during our meeting. If you are receiving a call, please take it outside of this room. Thank you for your cooperation in this regard.

Now to get back to the Canadian Human Rights Act, to help us with our review we have two witnesses as individuals, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. Welcome to both of you. You've probably been apprised of the process. Each of you has 10 minutes to present, and then we'll throw the floor open for questions by our committee members.

Mr. Levant, perhaps you could start. You have 10 minutes.

Identity Theft

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, in fact the government has reintroduced a bill that would take aim at identity theft and would give police the tools they need to stop this activity before the damage is done. We know that organized crime and modern technology are changing the criminal landscape to make identity theft easier than ever. I have been calling on the opposition to expedite the passage of this bill. This is the second time we have introduced the bill. What is the problem with those people? Let us get Bill S-4 passed.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Just before you adjourn, I'm concerned that the title insurance people weren't here today. I understood from the work my office had been doing with them that they did want to appear. There had been contact with the clerk of this committee. I saw the list this morning and they weren't on, and I don't know what has happened. It may be that they could not make this meeting. I still believe we should give them the opportunity to appear.

So in our scheduling over the next week or two, I would like to see that they come back and that Bill S-4 is on, even if it is for a short period of time, at another meeting.

[C/Supt Stephen White]

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with it to present a position on how it interacts with Bill S-4 at this point.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, Superintendent White.

In response to a question that you answered for my friend Mr. LeBlanc, and also for Ms. Brunelle, I think, regarding advancements in technology that white collar criminals and organized crime frequently employ, I think your response--and I don't mean to paraphrase you, because I know I'll do it inaccurately--was that law enforcement has a difficult time keeping up to the technological advancements that white collar criminals have access to, and that you're always a step behind, but this is one tool.

I was just wondering if you might be able to comment on this. I know you are not here to testify on Bill C-46, but you might be able to comment on how the interaction of Bill S-4 with Bill C-46 might operate. Bill C-46 is the technical assistance for law enforcement in the 21st century act, if you are familiar with that piece of legislation. How might that facilitate another tool?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for your excellent presentations.

I want to pick up on a question for the Canadian Bar Association that my friend Mr. Comartin raised with respect to your objections to clauses 7 and 9. I thought I understood this, but I was confused by some of the dialogue.

In light of the law enforcement exemptions that currently exist in section 25 of the code, why specifically do you advocate that clauses 7 and 9 of Bill S-4 be removed?

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair; and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I'm usually, and in this instance, particularly concerned about victims. They are the people who seem to be least considered when legislation is being formed. But in Bill S-4, as far as I'm concerned, the victim seems to be the primary concern, and that's a refreshing change.

This question is primarily for the RCMP, but Ms. Stoddart, please feel free to interject should you have something to add that you feel is pertinent.

What I particularly like about this bill is that it contains a provision where offenders will be required to pay restitution to the victims of identity theft and fraud when it comes to the costs of reclaiming their own identity. As I've mentioned, this is a welcome provision.

Having been recently a victim with one of my credit cards being cloned, I can say it didn't cost me anything directly, but we all have to be adult enough to know that when the credit card companies suffer a loss, guess who ends up paying for that loss: it is each and every one of us. So as we attempt to mine out these organizations, these criminal enterprises, and go after them, I believe this is a welcome provision.

By the way, I recently saw some numbers on the cost of identity theft, and I think it was conservatively estimated, just for Canada alone, at about $2 billion a year. Again, because of its nature, we don't know, but $2 billion as a conservative estimate means it's probably closer to $4 million or $5 million, I suspect.

Chief Superintendent and Inspector, in your experience, what kinds of hardship will a person who is victimized by identity theft face, and how likely are they to recoup anything? I ask that not to be facetious or anything. I know much of it will be anecdotal, when you speak to members who are in the field, etc.

Perhaps Ms. Stoddart can then also comment from her perspective.

[Chief Superintendent Stephen White, Director General, Financial Crime, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. Thank you very much for inviting us to be a part of today's hearing. Here with me is Inspector Kerry Petryshyn, officer in charge of major fraud and bankruptcy within our commercial crime branch.

I appreciate having this opportunity to present the RCMP's perspective on the current state of identity theft and fraud in Canada.

White collar crimes come in many different forms, including mass marketing fraud, payment card fraud, identity theft and identity fraud, capital markets fraud, and money laundering, as a few examples. The significant growth of technology and the widespread use of computers have led to great advances in research and global communications, but they've also opened the floodgates for enterprising criminals. Technology has had a significant impact on the manner in which economic crimes are committed, their frequency, and the challenges faced by investigators dealing with this type of crime.

As businesses and financial transactions become more and more Internet dependent, new opportunities are emerging to facilitate financial crimes. Before computers and the widespread use of the Internet and other associated technology, stealing and using another person's identity was a relatively difficult crime to commit. Criminals had to invest considerable time and effort in the process, and the risks were high. To assume someone's identity, a thief had to break into a house, or steal a purse or a wallet. Today's technologically adept thieves can do just as much damage in the time it takes to swipe your bank card through the reader at a cash register.

The same technology that has made our lives more convenient by allowing us to shop from home and operate in a virtually cash-free marketplace has also given rise to countless new criminal opportunities for identity thieves.

They can now steal your personal information from the comfort of their home offices half a world away, taking advantage of everyday transactions that require people to share personal information for identification purposes.

The growing impact of identity theft and fraud is deeply troubling. A 2008 EKOS survey found that 9 out of 10 Canadians were somewhat concerned that they could be victimized by identity theft and fraud. The survey also indicated that Canadians ranked the economic crimes of fraud and identity theft as their number one concern, more troubling than terrorism, organized crime, and gang violence.

That's why we have to view economic crime as being every bit as serious as many other types of criminal activity. It is true that identity theft and fraud, for example, are less physically dangerous than many types of criminal activity; however, their social damage can be very severe and can undermine the trust that people have in their society.

The cost to a person who has had his or her identity stolen can be enormous: financial loss and the investment of hundreds of hours trying to re-establish identity and good credit all take their toll.

A recent study by McMaster University estimated that in 2008 1.7 million Canadian identity theft victims spent 20 million hours and $150 million clearing their names. Of course, individuals aren't the only victims. Stolen identities are also used to commit frauds involving government services, benefits, and official documents. Financial institutions and retailers, the foundation of our economy, suffer growing losses every year.

Evidence indicates that identity fraud isn't just committed by enterprising individuals. Organized criminal groups are also applying their considerable resources to this expanding field of opportunities.

Quantifying the damage is extremely difficult. Many instances of this type of fraud go unreported, so definitive statistics are hard to come by. PhoneBusters, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Call Centre jointly operated by the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Competition Bureau of Canada, can only maintain statistics on the complaints they receive. In other words, the more than 11,000 complaints received by the call centre in 2008 reflect only a small percentage of the problem.

The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus indicated that identity theft was the fastest growing type of fraud in North America, with the cost to consumers, banks, credit card firms, and retailers estimated to be in the billions of dollars each year.

Raising public awareness about protecting personal information is currently the best tool we have for preventing identity fraud. Along with members working in RCMP detachments across the country, members in our financial crime units make numerous presentations to educate the public on this issue.

Whether these presentations are made to businesses, government agencies, or community groups, the messages are the same: protect your personal information, shred unwanted personal documents, and be wary of suspicious e-mails. Prevention is still the best cure, but prevention can only do so much.

Identity fraud is clearly emerging as an immense problem. In consultation with key stakeholders and other law enforcement agencies, the RCMP is developing an identity fraud strategy focusing on criminal intelligence and analysis, prevention through education and awareness, and disruption and enforcement.

We are also heading up the creation of an international identity fraud working group, the objective of which is to obtain an overview of other countries' identity fraud strategies, discuss related joint priorities, and develop an international strategy.

Currently the Criminal Code does not contain specific offences pertaining to identity theft. Most Criminal Code offences relating to property crimes were enacted before computers and the Internet were even invented. While the Criminal Code addresses most fraudulent uses of personal information by identity thieves, it does not address the unauthorized collection, possession, and trafficking of personal information for the purpose of future criminal activity.

As I indicated in my opening remarks, the changing environment is one of the greatest challenges we face in our efforts to combat financial crime. The growing sophistication of this type of criminal activity is abetted by the same techniques and technologies that spur legitimate opportunities for business.

Why be reactive when we can be proactive? We must be constantly examining our environment to identify new tools that can greatly assist us in investigating white collar crime.

Bill S-4 will close legislative gaps that currently allow criminals to collect, possess, and traffic in personal identification information and documents. Legislative amendments aimed at closing the identity theft gap would help the RCMP and other law enforcement agencies protect not only individual Canadians but also the integrity of our economy. We welcome laws that will move us closer to this goal.

Mr. Chair and honourable members of this committee, that concludes my prepared remarks. Now we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you.

[Daniel MacRury, Treasurer, National Criminal Justice Section, Canadian Bar Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to thank the honourable members for the opportunity to make a submission today on behalf of the Canadian Bar Association criminal justice section.

The Canadian Bar Association criminal justice section commends the efforts of Bill S-4 to address identity theft and related criminal activity, as these are serious problems giving rise to significant individual and societal losses. We appreciate that Bill S-4 would restrict the scope of some of the proposed new offences so as not to inadvertently capture unrelated or innocent conduct, particularly in relation to new offences concerning identity documents and information. We also support Bill S-4’s proposed removal of certain reverse onus provisions of the Criminal Code. We recommend several amendments that we believe add clarity and certainty to the proposals contained in Bill S-4.

The CBA criminal justice section's comments today are guided by three principles. One is the principle of legislative restraint. Revisions to the Criminal Code should only be made where existing provisions are inadequate. Two, any new proposals must comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Three, changes to the Criminal Code alone are generally insufficient to address serious or complex problems. To be effective, such changes must be accompanied by refinements in law enforcement practice and procedure, increased public education, or other legislative amendments.

The last observation may be particularly applicable to the problem of identity theft. The federal Privacy Commissioner and other organizations have noted that an effective response to identity theft will require a comprehensive approach, including a broad range of initiatives in addition to changes to the Criminal Code. In other words, there has to be more than one tool in the toolbox to address this serious problem.

We would like to make the following recommendations. First, Bill S-4 should be amended to expressly exclude the general provisions of attempt and counselling and certain types of de minimis behaviour.

Second, the relationship between the new offences proposed in Bill S-4 and the existing general provisions should be clarified.

Third, the proposal to prohibit possession of identity information should be amended to offer greater clarity by replacing the term “is reckless” with more explicit language.

Fourth, the exemption for certain police activities in clauses 7 and 9 of Bill S-4 should be removed.

In relation to recommendations one and two, the bill defines a new category of documents described as identity documents. It proposes a wide range of offences, including procurement, possessing, and selling social insurance numbers, drivers licences, etc. Given the combined scope of the definition and the proposed offences, we believe that the bill's proposal to add new defences to the existing concept of lawful excuse is appropriate. It is a clear attempt to restrict the reach of these provisions and is consistent with the concerns we have addressed in the past.

In spite of Bill S-4's proposed restrictions, other jurisdictions go further to restrict the reach of similar provisions in two ways. First, they expressly exclude the general provisions of attempt and counselling. Second, they expressly exclude certain types of de minimis behaviour, such as for young persons possessing identity documents to gain admission to licensed premises.

The criminal justice section recommends that Bill S-4 be amended to expressly exclude general provisions of attempt and counselling and certain de minimis behaviour. There also should be some clarity between the existing provisions and the new bill.

On our third recommendation, the section believes that the term “reckless” should be clarified. Proposed section 402.2 prohibits possession for the purpose of transmission, making available, distribution and sale, or offer for sale of that information where an individual knows, believes, or is reckless as to whether the information will be used to commit an indictable offence containing an essential element of fraud, deceit, or falsehood.

Including recklessness as a form of the mental element for this offence could be seen as responding to the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Hamilton. We also note concerns about the formulation, particularly as it might apply to businesses or industries that handle large volumes of such information. While the term “reckless” is used in the Criminal Code, it is not free from controversy and occasional interpretive difficulty.

To provide greater clarity and to address some of the business and industry concerns, we suggest more explicit language. For example, in R. v. Hamilton, the Supreme Court of Canada equated recklessness with “conscious disregard of the substantial and unjustified risk”.

In the Hamilton decision, the Supreme Court of Canada, at paragraph 28, stated:

The “substantial and unjustified risk” standard of recklessness has venerable roots in Canada and in other common law jurisdictions

It cited cases, and then the court went on to say:

Finally, a brief word on R. v. Sansregret.... The Court in that case defined recklessness as the conduct of “one who, aware that there is danger that his conduct could bring about the result prohibited by the criminal law, nevertheless persists, despite the risk...in other words, the conduct of one who sees the risk and who takes the chance”.... The Court, in Sansregret, did not set out the degree of risk required to attract criminal sanction.

As well, in the decision, the Supreme Court of Canada said at paragraph 33:

We have not been invited in this case to revisit Sansregret or to consider afresh the governing principles of recklessness

It is our submission today that, without clarity in the definition, the courts will have to consider afresh the governing principles of recklessness.

That deals with our concern in relation to recklessness.

Our fourth recommendation to you today deals with the exceptions for police and other official acts. Clauses 7 and 9 propose another exemption for certain activities for public officers as defined by section 25.1 of the Criminal Code. Given the existing legislative scheme, it is unclear why another exemption might be necessary. The Canadian Bar Association criminal section has strongly opposed an exemption from criminal liability for police or their agents, arguing that the law should apply to everyone, but acknowledges that the existing sections contain certain detailed procedural safeguards and reporting requirements. We see no reason the acts specified in Bill S-4 would be inadequately addressed by the existing scheme, and we are opposed to creating further exemptions of this sort.

The criminal justice section recommends that the police activities in clauses 7 and 9 of Bill S-4 be removed.

In conclusion, this section recognizes the prevalence and seriousness of identity theft. We appreciate the efforts in Bill S-4 to provide narrowly circumscribed new offences to address the issue without inadvertently capturing what should properly be non-criminal activity. To further advance this objective, we suggest some clarity in the language of the bill—for example, surrounding the mental element of recklessness, as well as a clarification of the interaction between some of the proposed offences and the attempt and counselling provisions of the code. We also appreciate the proposal to increase the use of a hybrid structure of offences to give greater flexibility and scope to prosecutorial discretion in dealing with these matters.

I would like to thank the honourable members for this opportunity this afternoon.

[Gaylene Schellenberg]

Thank you for the invitation to present the Canadian Bar Association's views on Bill S-4 to you today.

The CBA is a national association of over 37,000 members, including lawyers, notaries, law students, and academics. An important aspect of our mandate is seeking improvement in the law and the administration of justice, and it's from that perspective that we appear before you today.

With me is Dan MacRury, the current treasurer of our national criminal justice section. The section represents a balance of crowns and defence lawyers from every part of the country. Dan is a prosecutor from Sydney, Nova Scotia. I'll turn it over to him to present the substance of our submission to you.

[Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I don't think I'll take 10 minutes.

I have appeared on this question several times in the past few years. I've been fairly outspoken about the problem. I'm very pleased to see that the government is taking action on it today.

Polling conducted by my office this year has revealed that one in six Canadians has experienced some form of identity theft. Over 90% of Canadians are concerned about this issue of identify theft.

As you know, identify theft is a broad term that is often used to describe a wide range of behaviour. It can include credit card fraud, it often involves pretexting--pretending to be someone else in order to purchase goods or services or obtain that person's personal information. There are also more sophisticated techniques such as skimming, which involves stealing personal information from the magnetic strips of debit and credit cards through the use of small electronic devices.

I'm sure everyone here has received numerous phishing e-mails from what appear to be reputable organizations such as banks and caisses populaires--even the Government of Canada was a victim of phishing last year--asking us to verify our account information or provide personal information to the sender.

As technology evolves, identity thieves are constantly looking for new ways to obtain personal information. Just last month a man who has been called the world's most prolific identity thief pleaded guilty in Florida to stealing tens of millions of credit and debit card records by identifying and exploiting weaknesses in retailers' wireless networks.

Identity thieves then use this personal information to withdraw money from bank accounts, obtain loans or credit cards, obtain government benefits and even take out mortgages.

We often talk about identity theft in terms of the financial cost and while victims of identity theft may suffer significant financial loss, they are also likely to feel that their privacy has been invaded.

The lessons of the past few years teach us that stronger protections are needed if privacy is to have any meaning at all in the face of contemporary challenges. Bill S-4 is a significant step in the right direction. However, it should form part of a broader-based strategy to address identity theft and identity fraud.

The recent introduction of anti-spam legislation is also an important contribution to this process. The proposed Electronic Commerce Protection Act prohibits the sending of unsolicited commercial electronic messages without consent. It includes targeted provisions against phishing and spyware, and it provides a private right of action against spammers. The Act also sets out a coordinated approach to enforcement that allows for co-operation and information sharing with foreign authorities.

So that's another piece of legislation that is already before this House.

I would like to see a similar coordinated approach to ID theft. We have the expertise and the resources. There is the PhoneBusters anti-fraud call centre operated by the RCMP, the Competition Bureau, and the Ontario Provincial Police. There are excellent resources on identity theft on the Safe Canada website set up by Public Safety Canada. Now we really need the police and regulators, the public and private sectors, and federal and provincial officials to work together.

In our recommendations for the reform of the Privacy Act we have asked for stronger regulation, including better security safeguards, and we continue to believe that broader access to the courts is important for Canadians. In the review of our private sector legislation, PIPEDA, we have similarly recommended changes that would allow us to better regulate personal information handling practices, and we have called for mandatory breach notification for the private sector. These measures would empower Canadians to prevent identity theft and motivate companies and government organizations to properly safeguard personal information under their control.

Thank you once again, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to speak on this very important issue. I will answer any questions as best I can.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome, everyone, to the 34th meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Today is Monday, September 28, 2009.

You have before you the agenda for today. You will have noticed that today we are continuing our review of Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

We have before us four organizations.

Just so you know, one organization cancelled. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police had to bow out at the last minute. That leaves us with four organizations.

First, representing the Information Technology Association of Canada, we have Bernard A. Courtois.

We also have the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Jennifer Stoddart is the commissioner, and Carman Baggaley is the strategic policy adviser.

Representing the Canadian Bar Association, we have Gaylene Shellenberg, who is a lawyer with that organization, and also Daniel MacRury, who is the treasurer.

Finally, we have the RCMP represented. We have Chief Superintendent Stephen White and also Inspector Kerry Petryshyn.

Welcome to all of you. I think you've been told the process. Each organization has 10 minutes to present. Then we'll open the floor to questions from our members.

Mr. Courtois, please proceed. You have 10 minutes.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

On that point, with the prospect of dissolution and an untimely and, in my view, unnecessary fall election, what advice do you have to this committee to get Bill S-4 through committee and the House, and the other very important bills, too, before we're thrust into an unnecessary election?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you for that.

At some point, we're going to be asked to do a clause-by-clause examination of this bill. I wasn't part of the 39th Parliament, but I understand that Bill S-4 in its original form is substantially the same as Bill C-27. The Senate made some amendments to Bill S-4.

In your view, Minister, are the amendments appropriate? Did they strengthen the bill?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Minister and your officials, for your attendance here this morning. Once again, thank you, Minister, for promoting your very aggressive safe street and safe community agenda.

We've dealt with a number of pieces of legislation in this committee--Bill C-14 with respect to organized crime and Bill C-15 with respect to mandatory sentences for those who traffic in narcotics. Now we're dealing with identity theft, a bill that originated in the Senate and is now before the House of Commons justice committee.

With respect to your overall anti-organized crime agenda, we've certainly heard anecdotally and otherwise that identity theft is the crime of the 21st century. You indicated in your comments that often law enforcement has a difficult time keeping up to advances in organized crime, with technology and high-tech devices, the Internet, and so on.

Mr. Minister, can you tell us specifically how Bill S-4 deals with the government's overall strategy and its motivation to combat criminal activity and organized crime?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Minister, and to your officials for being here.

If I can just pursue the line of questioning of Mr. Lemay, it's my understanding that this legislation, Bill S-4, will bring us generally in line with where England and Australia are. I don't know about New Zealand. Am I right on that, that they already have legislation that covers these points?

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice]

Thank you very much, Chair and committee members.

I'm pleased to be here today to talk about Bill S-4, which addresses concerns about identity-related crimes. Bill S-4 has been passed by the Senate, with some changes that I will bring to your attention. I urge the committee members to give this bill serious study and consideration, but I would also hope that the members would complete their study in an expeditious manner and return the bill to the House of Commons without amendment so it can be passed into law as quickly as possible. Canada needs this law.

Criminals have always concealed their true identities and assumed false ones. What has changed in recent decades is their increasing reliance on technology. Technology has brought us greater convenience and speed of communications and commerce, but criminals also enjoy new opportunities to obtain greater illicit benefits at little risk. The government believes these new threats can and must be addressed with Criminal Code amendments.

In Canada the Criminal Code has always had some offences that target the actual misuse of identity. The most directly applicable offence is that of personation, a serious offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison. If you impersonate a real person, living or dead, with an intent to gain an advantage of some kind or to cause anyone a disadvantage, this amounts to personation. There are numerous secondary offences, such as forgery of documents, including identity documents; and fraud; misuse of credit cards; and other offences in order to protect specific forms of identification, such as a Canadian passport.

Bill S-4 makes some reforms to modernize and update these offences, but its main purpose is the creation of new offences that directly target the early stages of identification and identity information misuse and abuse. The new measures are necessary to close gaps created by new technologies and new criminal operations. While taking physical documents may amount to the crime of theft, simply copying or having information, even if that is done for the purpose of later using that information to commit a crime, is not addressed by traditional property offences or any other offence, unless the Criminal Code specifically addresses it. It is the unique nature of information that poses this problem, information that is not considered property by the criminal law.

The benefit of the new offences is they can be applied before offenders have a chance to actually misuse personal information to the detriment—financial or otherwise—of others. They enable law enforcement to become engaged at much earlier stages of criminal schemes. This will result in a reduction of the more serious kinds of victimization that result when identities are fraudulently abused.

Let me turn now to what I believe are the key amendments in this package. I will also point out certain amendments passed by the Senate's Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, later approved by the Senate as a whole. I believe these changes improve the bill.

The first key element would form a new section 56.1 and criminalize the procurement, possession, transfer, and sale or offering for sale of specified government-issued identity documents without a lawful excuse. At present, simply possessing or trafficking in other people's identity documents is not a crime. We believe it should be—subject to appropriate exceptions, of course. To this end, the bill allows for several specific lawful excuses, such as handling documents with the consent of the person to whom they belong, or carrying out one's job function.

The offence was drafted with a specific and closed list of government documents covered by the offence, such as a social insurance number card and a driver's licence. The Senate was concerned that a closed list would mean that further documents created by the federal or provincial governments, which could be used for identification purposes, would not be covered. So they opened the list slightly, by allowing for inclusion of any document that is similar to the ones used. This was a small but important improvement, in my opinion.

The second key amendment is the creation of a new offence of identity theft and a companion offence of trafficking in identity information. The proposed new identify theft offence deals primarily with obtaining or possessing identity information in circumstances that show intent to commit one of a series of other related offences, such as fraud or personation.

A related offence will be established to cover trafficking in such information, knowing or being reckless as to whether it will be used for one of those same offences. Both offences will be informed by a broad definition of identity information, which covers all the types of information that can be used to identify a person.

Based on the definition, these offences are directed at the mishandling of information. It does not matter whether the information is contained in an official identification document or whether it is merely copied or stored in some other form.

There are also related amendments to the offence of personation. The offence of personation will now be renamed as “identity fraud”, so that the Criminal Code will present a coherent picture of the various stages of identity crime. The offence of identity theft will cover the early stages in gathering and handling of the information; in the middle will be the offence of trafficking in identity information; and at the far end of the spectrum, the offence of identity fraud will cover the actual deceptive use of the information.

Bill S-4 also clarifies and extends certain existing offences in the Criminal Code. The bill will improve the law in relation to credit and debit card offences, misconduct in relation to the mail, and forgery offences.

I would take the opportunity to point out one more amendment made by the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee in relation to an amendment to the credit and debit card offences.

One amendment in the bill added the notion of personal identification number, or, as we usually refer to it, the PIN, to the offence of unlawfully possessing or using credit card data. The Senate expanded the concept to personal authentification information, the idea being that, with the advances in technology, there may one day be forms of authentification associated with credit and debit cards beyond just a PIN—for instance, a fingerprint. The change made by the Senate ensures that developments in technology will be captured by the law. Once again, I consider this change to be an improvement.

The government realizes that officials from legitimate investigative agencies often must conceal their true identities in the course of undercover investigations. To ensure that law enforcement can continue to work under cover to keep Canadians safe from crime, Bill S-4 excludes law enforcement from certain offences in relation to forged documents for otherwise lawful conduct undertaken in the course of their duties or employment. Agencies that produce identity documents are also exempted if they make false identity documents for use in covert operations in good faith and at the request of a government agency.

I'd like to be clear that these measures do not exempt the police from identity theft or personation or fraud offences. They only permit the police to make, have, and use false documents that portray a fictitious identity—just so we're clear.

This concludes my summary and what I believe are the key elements of this package. I and the officials who were good enough to be here with me today would be pleased to respond to any questions you might have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Good morning, everybody.

I call the meeting to order. This is meeting 33 of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Today is Thursday, September 17, 2009. As a note to all of you, this meeting is being televised.

You have before you the agenda for today. We'll leave 20 minutes at the end of today's meeting to go in camera to plan future business and also to review the report of the steering subcommittee, which was held on Tuesday.

Once again I remind all of you to turn off your cellphones and BlackBerrys, or set them to vibrate. If you're going to take phone calls, please take them outside of the room as a courtesy to our witnesses.

Now, going back to our agenda, by order of reference we're considering Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct). To help with our review of this bill, we have with us again our Minister of Justice and Attorney General for Canada, the Honourable Rob Nicholson. Welcome here, Minister.

Supporting the minister we have Joanne Klineberg and Marke Kilkie. Both are counsel with the criminal law policy section. Welcome to you as well.

Minister, you know the process. You have ten minutes to present, and then we'll open the floor to questions.

Thank you.

Opposition Motion--Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the opposition day motion moved by the hon. member for Wascana, the Liberal House leader.

The motion recognizes the role of the House in ensuring government accountability. As we know, that is the primary function of Parliament in our Westminster system.

More specifically, the motion at hand calls for three things: first, that the Standing Orders of the House be changed with respect to the scheduling of allotted days this fall; second, that the House calendar be altered to accommodate the G20 meetings in September; and third, that the government table an additional report on the implementation of the 2009 budget.

I will touch on these three points very briefly, as it is the government's intention to support the motion. I will devote the remainder of my remarks to a more general discourse on the successful functioning of Parliament and my experiences of this past session.

The opposition day motion provides for a change to the rules of Parliament with regard to how the government may allocate opposition days this fall. Since coming to office in 2006, as a general rule our government has always tried to evenly distribute the opposition days in the parliamentary calendar. In certain circumstances we recognize that legislative priorities can force a deviation from this practice. However, we do support the idea of amending the Standing Orders to ensure that this usual practice becomes a rule.

The second provision of today's opposition day motion provides for a change to the House calendar for the fall of 2009. Under this provision the House would open a week earlier than currently scheduled and it would then adjourn for the week of September 21. This will enable the government to focus on the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 24 and 25.

The G20 is the chief forum for the world leaders, as a group, to address issues resulting from the global economic crisis, and Canada has played an active and important role in these discussions. At the fall G20 meetings, the Prime Minister and other world leaders will discuss progress in promoting economic recovery and they will consider new ways to address global economic and financial challenges.

I think we can all agree that there is no more pressing issue before Parliament than dealing with the global economic downturn, which has caused personal hardship and job loss around the world. Unfortunately, as we all know, Canada has not been immune.

Our legislative program of this past session has reflected that the economy is the number one issue for Canadians. As such, I am pleased to support a motion that permits the Government of Canada to give its undivided attention to the critical economic discussions that will be taking place at the G20 summit in September.

The third provision of today's opposition motion requests that the government table an additional report on the implementation of the 2009 budget. In the face of global economic uncertainty, this government presented a budget in January with a comprehensive economic action plan to stimulate economic growth, restore confidence and support Canadians and their families during this global recession.

This economic recovery program is unprecedented in our history, and it is working. Canada was the last group of seven country to enter recession and the International Monetary Fund expects that we will have the strongest recovery coming out of it.

The government has also taken unprecedented steps in reporting on our economic action plan. We tabled an initial budget report in March. A week ago we tabled a second budget report, which outlines how 80% of the measures in our economic action plan are already being implemented. This government welcomes the opportunity provided by today's opposition day motion to table a third budget report in September. In fact, we committed to such a report in our budget presentation earlier this past winter.

The Minister of Finance announced at the time that he would be tabling an economic report in the fall. This being the case, I commend the official opposition for echoing the government's pre-existing intention and commitment to provide quarterly reports on the economy in and through the House to all Canadians. As we debate this today, I think it is important to remember that the government was already committed to providing that report in September.

As all members in the House know, the last few weeks have not been easy in this place. In fact they have not been easy on Canadians from coast to coast to coast. During this time of economic challenge, Canadians did not want to hear about the possibility of an election. Canadians want us to continue to work to achieve results for them. They know we cannot afford an election, which would put Canada's economic recovery at risk, halt stimulus investment across the country and limit our ability to continue to implement our economic action plan for Canadians.

By avoiding an election, we have enabled the government to continue its course of doing everything possible to turn this global recession around on our own soil. The cooperation we have seen emerge over this week, spearheaded by our Prime Minister, has not only avoided a costly and unwanted election but has clearly demonstrated to Canadians that their Parliament can work for them.

Despite the partisan political drama played out during the daily 45 minutes of question period, Canadians may be surprised to know just how cooperative and productive this past session of Parliament has been. Since January, our government has worked with all opposition parties to advance many important bills that will help Canadian families. We have moved forward on our electoral commitments, and I am pleased that much more has been done.

Since January, the government has introduced a total of 54 bills. By the time the Senate adjourns for the summer next week, I expect we will have royal assent on 26 of those bills, including such important legislative initiatives as Bill C-33, which will restore war veterans' allowances to allied veterans and their families; Bill C-29, to guarantee an estimated $1 billion in loans over the next five years to Canadian farm families and co-operatives; Bill C-3, to promote the economic development of Canada's north; Bill C-28, to increase the governance capacity of first nations in Canada; and Bill C-14, a critically important justice bill to fight the scourge of organized crime.

Although much work has been accomplished, a good number of bills that continue to be priorities of our government remain on the order paper, including Bill C-6, to enact Canada's consumer product safety act to help protect the health and safety of all Canadians; Bill C-8, to provide first nations women on reserve with the same rights and protections enjoyed by all other Canadians; and Bill C-23, to open new doors for trade between Canada and Colombia.

Furthermore, our government has continued to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to fighting crime and violence in this country. Our justice minister, the hon. member for Niagara Falls, has been unrelenting in his determination to hold criminals accountable and protect victims and law-abiding Canadian citizens.

Over a dozen justice related bills have been introduced since the beginning of this parliamentary session, which include Bill C-15, Bill C-26 and Bill S-4, to help fight crimes related to criminal organizations, such as drug-related offences, identity theft and auto theft; Bill C-25, which will return truth in sentencing and eliminate the two for one credit; Bill C-36, which will repeal the faint hope clause, and Bill C-19, the new anti-terrorism bill.

Unfortunately none of these bills have completed the legislative process during this session of Parliament. Again, due to the leadership of our Prime Minister, thankfully our country will not be plunged into an election and these bills will remain on the order paper. We hope to pass them into law in the fall.

I look forward to continuing the spirit of cooperation in this place in September to accomplish this unfinished business for all Canadians. Five of these bills have already passed one chamber of Parliament and they are before the second House for consideration. On behalf of vulnerable Canadians in particular, we have to keep moving to get the job done on this important legislation.

In closing, I am pleased that the government has been able to develop today's opposition day motion in cooperation with the official opposition. This House of Commons should more often focus on what all of us have in common rather than what divides us. While I would have liked to have seen some debate on some of our newer bills that we have just introduced and passed more of our justice and safety bills, this parliamentary sitting is winding down in the age-old Canadian tradition of compromise.

We all know that this place is about debate, trade-offs, negotiations and compromise. This is how Parliament works. This is how our very country was born, has grown and continues to develop and flourish.

As I have already indicated, the government will be supporting today's motion. I again salute our Prime Minister for his leadership in staving off an election, which I think would be dreaded by the vast majority of Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, I wish you, and all colleagues in this House, a very happy summer.

Criminal Code

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak to Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

The bill would amend the Criminal Code to create offences of identity theft, trafficking in identity information and unlawful possession or trafficking in certain government-issued identity documents, to clarify and expand certain offences related to identity theft and identity fraud, to exempt certain persons from liability for certain forgery offences, and to allow for an order that the offender make restitution to a victim of identity theft or identity fraud for the expenses associated with rehabilitating their identity.

Like Bill C-26, which we discussed the other day, the auto theft legislation, this bill is only one part of a multi-pronged approach to attack the problem of identity theft. In both cases, the auto theft legislation and the identity theft legislation, we must begin our battle with strong changes to the Criminal Code, which itself was written in 1892 and is in dire need of a rewrite. Judging by the number of lawyers in this chamber, we are shortchanging the public if we do not embark on that rewrite sooner rather than later.

The legislation will go a long way to help the police investigate and take action regarding credit card fraud. All too often I have heard constituents complain that they feel abandoned by the police after their credit card has been stolen and has been used in a fraudulent manner. When they go to the police station they are told to take a number and wait until it is their turn. When their turn comes they are told that there were 30 similar cases that day, and without tough legislation, it is better to deal with it as a civil matter.

By bringing in tough new Criminal Code legislation, we take away that argument that we should deal with it as a civil matter because we are not going to get anywhere with it anyway in the absence of the legislation. Therefore, I think this is a very positive move to deal with that important area.

This happened in a case where the complainant did his own investigation of suspicious transactions, once he found out that the credit card was being misused, and in effect identified the guilty party. He basically turned the entire documented, solved case over to the RCMP, hoping to be thanked for all the hard work and a job well done. However, in fact, the person was told to go home, that the credit card company would just simply absorb the loss and that he would not be out any money.

That certainly did not make him very happy about this whole process, not to mention all the trauma involved in actually having the credit card stolen in the first place and a lot of transactions being put on the credit card, and all the phone calls, and so on, that it takes to resolve this issue.

That type of action merely encourages criminals to do it again and tell their friends, “Don't worry. You can't get caught, and if you do get caught, nothing will happen to you”. This is not a good signal to be sending to the public. We need this tough legislation to allow the police to take action.

If we had had it, the police probably would not have had 30 new cases that morning, because the criminals would know that something was going to happen to them in the first place and they might have thought twice about stealing the credit card.

The next area is to properly resource the police. In Manitoba's case, the parallel I draw is the gang suppression unit and the auto theft suppression unit of the police force. It is basically setting up a special unit in the police department that is resourced and tasked to deal with the problem at hand, to target the highest risk-level of offender. In the case of the auto theft group, I believe level 4 is the highest group. We are not talking about a lot of people. We are talking about perhaps 50 people in the high-risk groups.

We have to dedicate a special unit to go after identity theft.

As with the auto thieves, we are looking at a very small group of people. I would submit that is the situation with identity theft. When I go to one of the seniors' homes in my riding where there are 500 people, it would be safe to bet that not one of them would contemplate committing identity theft, stealing or misusing a credit card, or anything of the sort.

If we eliminate those people and other large groups, we come down to very small numbers. My submission would also be that those small numbers would be the repeat offenders who are doing it essentially as a profession, as a job. We have to aggressively target these offenders.

As I indicated in the case of the debit card and the bank card skimmers, often gangs with overseas connections may be operating here because it is easy. They have little chance of being caught, and certainly they are not treated very badly when they are caught.

There was a ring uncovered in the last couple of years, I believe from eastern Europe. The members of the group came to Canada for the sole purpose of going to various banks and credit unions across the country and putting credit card and debit card skimming equipment on ATMs. Over a three- or four-hour period they collected several hundred pieces of people's information. Using that information, they then proceeded to clean out people's bank accounts and make new copies of credit cards for further use.

In addition, clearly more consumer alerts are required. Part of the answer is getting consumers up to speed in this whole area.

I have had many tea parties in seniors' homes in my constituency of Elmwood—Transcona over the years where I have invited a member of the police force to talk about this very problem. The constable always has the same message: “Don't carry a big purse when you go out. Leave your ID at home. You're only going to Safeway. You're only going across the street. Why do you insist upon carrying a big purse with all your identification and enough contents to go on a trip somewhere when you are going to be back in a half hour?”

In some ways, we are all easy targets for thieves.

Fortunately we are seeing an explosion in the use of shredders. People are shredding more of their documents, and we can all agree with that. They are not throwing their bills out in the garbage like they used to; they are shredding them, which is a good sign.

However, I also juxtapose that to other people, maybe the same people who are happily shredding their documents, who attend the boat shows, the garden shows and the home shows at the convention centre in Winnipeg. I see them there on the weekends happily giving out their personal information when they are filling out applications for different free draws that exhibitors have. They do not consider that this information could be used improperly.

There are a number of other things we are told we should not be doing. Certainly mailbox fraud is a big area, and it is dealt with in the bill. Nowadays a lot of people have their mailboxes locked. That is a very good thing , because people do steal other people's mail and use that information for bad things.

On the last day of debate on this bill, a number of people mentioned we should reduce the number of mailed statements to our houses, that maybe we do not need monthly statements from our financial services people, that perhaps we could get by with quarterly statements.

They also suggest that sensitive information should be kept in a locked box. All too often we see people leaving information out. I guess the government has had some very bad experiences itself over the last couple of years with some members of Parliament leaving information in places when it should have been returned to its rightful place and locked up. We should be more organized in all of that.

Having said that, I may be one of the worst offenders, so I really do not want to go too far there.

It is also recommended that we do not let our credit cards out of sight at restaurants and gas stations. The reality is that we do this every day. Are we supposed to tell a waiter at the restaurant, “Sorry, I have to follow you to the machine to make sure you do not clone or skim my card”?

Another point was not to give credit card information over the phone unless one actually knows the person.

What is the answer? Clearly there is a bigger solution we have to deal with, and that is the whole area of technology and the inception of smart card programs.

I have followed this issue for a number of years. I recall back in 1990 or 1991, the Ontario NDP government at the time, led by somebody in this House I cannot mention, embarked on the first smart card idea. By the way, it was an idea that was way ahead of its time. Only France had embarked on a rudimentary smart card program at the time.

The Ontario government at that time set up pilot projects in Fort Frances and Windsor. It was trying to track the number of Americans who were coming across the border, getting OHIP cards, Ontario health cards, and then coming for free operations and health care.

At the end of the day, the project determined that Ontario had issued more OHIP cards than it had residents in the province. Beyond that, though, the government decided not to proceed further with the smart cards. I am not sure why it did not proceed; perhaps there was a change in government.

The NDP government was succeeded by the Harris government, which announced a new smart card program to run parallel to the program that was being introduced by the big banks at the time. I met with representatives in Toronto, and they gave me a tour through their nice new building. They had a very impressive program.

The government was going to start issuing smart cards at around $10 apiece. There was to be a health card on there and I think a driver's licence. Members should understand that these cards have the potential to have about five different things on them. Smart cards can have a driver's licence, a health card, a fishing licence, and a number of things. The government's plan was to roll out the program at a cost of $8 to $10 a card. Over time the price of the cards dropped, as we know.

While all of this was going on, the banks were going to roll out their system. They actually put off rolling it out for a few years, all the while knowing that people were being victimized. It was cheaper for the banks to pay the losses from the thefts and the misuse of the cards than it was to bring in the smart card technology. They were directly responsible for letting people go through all sorts of anguish for an extra five or six years because they did not want to put out the extra dollars. It was cheaper to lose the hundred million dollars, or whatever it was, per year in the thefts. We could have done something a long time ago in terms of smart cards because the technology was there, but it was going to be a little more expensive at the time.

In fact the banks are just rolling out their cards at the moment. Some members may have them, but if they do not, they certainly will be getting them within the next few months or the next year. I believe they had a plan where they were rolling out in certain areas a year or two ago, but the mass rolling out is just beginning.

These cards are a huge improvement over the old striped cards. The old cards are essentially obsolete and should be phased out as quickly as possible, because they are the easy ones to skim and counterfeit. Hopefully this will drastically reduce the credit card and debit card fraud and give consumers a breather, until these criminals can figure how out to compromise those cards. We may be ahead of the curve for a little while.

I am hoping we are going to have a huge overnight reduction in credit card and debit card fraud, similar to Manitoba's experience with its auto theft program. These cards, as I have indicated, are the answer in the same way that the immobilizers on cars were the answer in stopping auto theft.

Once again, the NDP are supporting actions that actually work. We do not want to head off on crime legislation like the Conservatives do, bringing in a bunch of things that have been proven not to work in other jurisdictions. We want to promote and initiate good ideas that actually have a history of working somewhere else.

We have a multi-pronged approach. We have tough criminal legislation. We have, for example, the auto theft suppression unit of the police, which is working well in Winnipeg and it could be working well nationally. We have the constant monitoring of suspects. We have to do that here as well. There is the whole idea of the mandatory immobilizers in the cars, and the GPS ankle bracelets.

To my friend from B.C., because I know he is upset about this bait car idea that I am not highly supportive of, I want to extend an olive branch. Since we are all trying to get along here in the House, I want to tell him that if he brings that bait car to Winnipeg in February and he can get it to actually work, I will be very happy to support his idea that we should try that as well. I do not think we want to exclude good ideas. Some ideas work better in some parts of the country than others.

In terms of identity theft, once again we have the tough criminal legislation in Bill S-4. We are reasonably happy with this bill. I think there are a couple of changes we would like to see, particularly for lawyers. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole area of mortgage fraud and so on is not covered by this bill. Lawyers across Canada have to be vigilant about that, because they are being presented with false identification from people attempting to get mortgage funds.

Once again, the police identity theft suppression unit has to be set up. We need more consumer alerts, which I have indicated, and the education programs, which we delved into. There is always room for more ideas. I do not think we should in any way exclude anybody with a good idea. Better smart card technology is the key here, because we have to keep ahead of the curve.

One of the members mentioned yesterday that we are dealing with almost $2 billion of losses. In fact identity theft has become so common that insurance companies have been selling identity theft coverage as an extension to house insurance policies for some four or five years now. Insurance companies would not do that if there was not a big market and a considerable demand for these programs. These programs are costly to set up. They need to have negotiations for re-insurance for the whole program.

Clearly this is a program that people are buying, because insurance companies are selling it. It pays to restore people to where they were before the loss. There is a considerable expense involved in trying to get credit cards and ID restored. Has anyone tried to get a driver's licence or a birth certificate replaced? It is a lot of work.

A lot of the identity theft is aided and abetted by the Internet. Criminals trade in stolen information. None of this existed 20 years ago. As one member mentioned yesterday with his Commodore 64, we did not have Internet access in those days and we did not have to worry about these things. The Internet and computers today mean we have a whole new exposure that we did not have before.

The criminals are passing on the information about where to buy these skimming machines and devices on how to clone credit cards. All this information is readily available to up-and-coming criminals who want to expand their lines of work.

Yesterday, the member for Winnipeg Centre asked about requiring the credit card companies to pass on to customers the results of their investigations. I agree totally. It is not included in the bill, but it is an important issue.

If people steal the identities of other people and use their credit cards, the credit care company will not give them any information about where they are at unless they investigate it. They are left to wonder who did it. It can be as traumatic as having one's home broken into and not knowing who did it.

I will proceed with the rest of my speech during the question and answer period.

The House resumed from June 16 consideration of the motion that Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to participate in the questions and comments, but I have missed a couple of opportunities, so I thought I would take this opportunity to express a couple of views about Bill S-4.

We have seen this bill before. As a matter of fact, we have seen the bills on drug trafficking and issues such as auto theft and identity theft. These are all amendments to the Criminal Code, and I have to wonder why the government has not put together an omnibus bill to deal with these.

These are all very similar in terms of the concerns for public safety issues and dealing with organized crime. Many of the witnesses would be the same. The efficiency of this place would be improved substantially if these were in an omnibus bill.

I know what the government is doing. It is basically saying that if it puts the bills out one at a time and milks them through all the stages and the press releases, et cetera, it leaves an impression somehow that it is being tough on crime. Well, if it wants to be tough on crime, it should pass legislation, not just talk about it. That is what is happening here.

Many of the issues we talked about today in debate are privacy related. The Privacy Act came in about 25 years ago, when the computer of the day was the Commodore 64. Technology is very important. It is not just about smart cards, it is that the legislation we have to protect the privacy of Canadians is way out of date.

One of the big problems, in my view, is that the Minister of Justice, who is responsible for this act, has said before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics that he is quite happy with the way the act is operating. That is unacceptable.

We had a bill on human pathogens and toxins. That bill prescribed the rules whereby private information on the health of certain Canadians would be shared with offshore jurisdictions and allowed to be passed on to others. The Privacy Commissioner did not even appear before the health committee. Why is that?

I hope that when the issue gets to the Senate the Privacy Commissioner will have an opportunity to express her concerns about this important issue, for which she had asked for a privacy impact assessment two years ago. The government has not taken her up on this. Why?

The House has to understand that when we address crime, it must be a comprehensive approach. It cannot just be punishment. It has to be prevention, remediation. It has to be a whole host of things, and I have not seen it. All I see are little rinky-dink bills for increased penalties or mandatory minimums.

We do not even have the resources for the policing authorities across the country to enforce the laws we pass here. We are not doing the job.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise on this very important issue of identity theft. Bill S-4, which comes to us from the Senate, is certainly a very important starting point. I should begin by saying the Bloc Québécois supports the principle of this bill.

We are obviously very concerned about identity theft. We are worried about it. The Criminal Code needs to be modernized to take this kind of theft into account.

However, identity theft should be fought through the concerted action of various levels of government. This is actually what we have just seen. It has probably not been done yet or not done well enough. It is important, therefore, to take a look at this bill and send it to committee for study of other aspects than changes to the Criminal Code. These changes are important and we agree with them, but that is not enough.

Governments need to look at other measures, such as public education, to reduce the number of victims. Identity theft and identity abuse could, in many cases, be dealt with through a good, Canada-wide education campaign.

Take the case of older people whose identities are often stolen because they are incredibly naïve when people approach them and when they use their own ID. A very good information campaign targeted at these people in particular would certainly result is less theft and reduced court costs. We should not rely solely on the Criminal Code and we should definitely establish a program to inform people about how their identities are stolen and with which means of communication. People’s identities are stolen over the telephone. That too reveals a disarming naivety.

We cannot expect to solve everything just by suppressing theft, and parallel to this legislation, we should also adopt regulations to provide better guidelines for the way companies manage, store and dispose of information. We need regulations outside this bill that would make a major contribution to providing better guidelines. There are also measures to ensure increased security and uniformity of the processes for issuing and verifying people’s identity documents.

Often, in the case of real estate fraud, people do not know how to protect their identity documents. We are not talking about credit cards here. Credit cards are important, but I think we talk about them far too much because some very major identity thefts take place through real estate transactions. People even sell houses that do not belong to them. Some people do that on quite a regular basis. Then it gets extremely complex for the victims to get their identity back. This legislation must address thoroughly the question of identity theft as it relates to real estate, because these transactions cost people huge amounts of money. Often these people have their entire lives ruined. Once they have lost their home, a year or three years later they are living somewhere else, but they have lost part of their life’s dream.

Coordination with governments is important, therefore, but we must also include real estate fraud more specifically. In some real estate frauds, and I have had cases in my riding, the people are no longer entitled to cross the American border because they are considered to be the ones who committed the fraud themselves. It is a temporary situation, because once that is resolved, everything is put back as it was.

This is therefore very serious and it is much more than a temporary pecuniary loss.

The purpose of the bill is to combat identity theft such as the unauthorized collection and use of personal information for criminal purposes. This is important. People do it in order to steal from other people. It is rare for someone to steal an identity simply to identify themself as someone else. In general, the bottom line will be crime.

Names, dates of birth, addresses, credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and any other personal identification number can be used to open a bank account, get a credit card, have mail forwarded, subscribe to a cell phone service, lease a vehicle or equipment, or even sell a house one does not own.

Three new basic offences are created by this bill, and that is very good. They are all subject to a maximum term of five years. That is why we believe these three offences should be considered in committee. They must be properly assessed so we know whether they will properly protect the public.

The three offences are: obtaining and possessing identity information with the intent of using it in a misleading, deceitful or fraudulent manner in the commission of a crime; trafficking in identity information, an offence that targets people who transfer or sell information to a third party, knowing or being reckless as to whether the information might be used for criminal purposes; and possession or illegally trafficking in identity documents issued by the government that contain information about another person.

People become someone else and are responsible.

There are also other amendments to the Criminal Code; the new offences of redirecting or causing to be redirected the mail of another person are created.

That may not seem serious, but people regularly take someone else’s mail, particularly in the suburbs.

The new offence of possession of a counterfeit Canada Post key will also be created.

That will be in the law and it is very important. Canada Post is installing more and more mailboxes with keys throughout rural communities. People are able to get their neighbours’ keys to steal their mail.

Additional forgery offences, such as trafficking in forged documents and possession of forged documents with the intent of using them, will be created.

This is another point addressed by the law that should be thoroughly considered in committee.

There will be the new term for the offence of personation, to be called identity fraud, and the meaning of the expression “personation” is clarified.

Moreover, the addition of a new power would enable the court to order the offender, as part of the penalty, to make restitution to the victim of identity theft or identity fraud for the expenses associated with rehabilitating their identity, including expenses to replace cards and documents and to correct their credit history.

All this does not address thefts in connection with real estate, which cost victims huge sums of money.

This legislation needs to be coordinated with the Civil Code of Quebec so that people can recover their property, whether it is money or something like a boat that was sold by someone it did not belong to. This often happens, because boats are harder to identify than cars. Even a house can be sold fraudulently.

Since this law should have been passed long ago in Canada, it is important to look at what has been done elsewhere, especially in the United States and France. I would like to give an example of what is done in France. Identity theft is not an indictable offence in itself, except in very specific cases, such as using a false identity in an authentic document or an administrative document intended for a public authority. Assuming a false name in order to obtain a police record check is an offence under the French criminal code. These are things we should look at, because the proposed legislation does not cover them.

In France, specific provisions stipulate the following:

A penalty of six months' imprisonment and a fine of € 7,500 [a substantial fine] is incurred by:

1. using a name or part of a name other than that assigned by civil status;

2. changing, altering or modifying a name or part of a name assigned by civil status,

in an authentic or public document or in an administrative document drafted for public authority, other than where regulations in force permit the drafting of such documents under an assumed civil status.

It would be a very good idea to refer to civil status for names, as French law does. Earlier, a member said that in Quebec, there are two ways for a person to be identified: by birth record or by government record. The first has been abandoned, and now only the government's birth records are officially valid. That is why it is a good idea to work with other governments to stay on top of how things are changing in the provinces.

Another important thing in France is this:

Identity theft becomes a criminal offence as soon as one “[assumes] the name of another person in circumstances that led or could have led to the initiation of a criminal prosecution”. In this case, it is punishable by five years' imprisonment and a fine of € 75,000.

That shows just how heavily the law relies on authorities with respect to civil status. It is interesting to see how other countries do things.

I have one last example, also from France. One article reads as follows:

Assuming the name of another person in circumstances that led or could have led to the initiation of a criminal prosecution against such a person is punished by five years' imprisonment and a fine of € 75,000.

[...]sentences imposed for this misdemeanour are cumulated, and may not run concurrently with any imposed for the offence in the context of which the name was usurped.

The penalties set out under the first paragraph apply to a false statement in respect of the civil status of a person which has led or could have led to the initiation of a criminal prosecution against another person.

That is why I think it is so important for the committee to find out how things are done in other countries and to acknowledge that others already have good identity theft legislation.

The Conservative member mentioned earlier that if we are serious about this bill, we should adopt it immediately without sending it to committee. We believe that, on the contrary, even though we support the bill and it is necessary, there is work to be done in committee. We cannot skip this very important step.

I was saying that the Bloc supports this bill. We wish to send it to committee because identity theft is an issue that we have felt strongly about for a long time. It is important that we realize that identity theft, the issue before us, can happen in various ways. For example, someone could take a social insurance card and use it to obtain housing under a name other than their own. They could build an identity with very few documents.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill S-4, a substantial irritation in my emotional level. I say that because the bill and this problem has been around the House for way too long a period of time. It has been delayed repeatedly by the government in spite of the reality of the problem for the whole of the country. Large numbers of people are suffering very negative consequences from identity theft criminal acts.

I want to go through it because it bothers me that the government pretends to be strong on crime and says that it will fight it in every way, but the bill is a classic example of how it is attempting to mislead the public in that regard.

The bill was introduced in the last Parliament to address the issue. It has had some amendments since then. It was knocked off its normal rotation because of prorogation by the government in September 2007. It was reintroduced when Parliament reopened. It went through the process of first and second reading. It was sent to the justice committee by March 2008, at which point, we were confronted with a justice committee that no longer functioned because the Conservative chair refused to call meetings or when he called meetings, he would abruptly get up and leave the chair and nobody would replace him. That went on until the summer of 2008 and early fall, when again the government stopped Parliament by calling an election against long-term promise by the Prime Minister not to do that.

We came back after the election and we were into a whole battle over conduct of the government in terms of not seriously addressing the fiscal crisis that both this country and countries internationally were confronting. Then we had another prorogation in December 2008.

We came back after the prorogation and what did we see? We saw this bill, not coming to the House, not to the elected chamber in our Parliament, but going to the unelected chamber down the hall, where it sat. Finally it was sent over here earlier this week.

The bill should have been law by the end of 2007, at least the initial issues that we were addressing, even without the amendments. At the rate we are going, it is not going to be law until sometime near the end of 2009. All of that delay is because of the government.

It is quite clear that the Conservatives cannot claim they did not know how serious the problem of identity theft was in the country. The member from Alberta on the government side introduced a private member's on this issue in a very concrete and extensive way. Unfortunately, it was not the appropriate mechanism to deal with a problem of this size. However, that bill is almost three years old. Therefore, in a very clear and irrefutable way the House has known about this problem for at least three years. It knew what we needed to do about it, as well, in terms of a legislative response.

The Criminal Code, as it is right now, is inadequate to deal with the identity theft problem. We have provisions in the code around forgery, impersonation, creating false documents, but they are a reflection of a technology and a societal norm that is 40 or 50 years out of date for the current situation we have. The ability, for instance, to manufacture large numbers of credit cards is a technology that has only existed for about 10 years. The ability to get personal identification numbers, or PINs, credit card numbers and other identification numbers electronically and in large volume has only been possible as the Internet developed, realistically the last five years.

We knew for at least three years, though I would say any of us working in this area at all knew for much longer than that. The government certainly knew, the Department of Justice knew, and our police forces knew. In spite of all that knowledge, here we are today in the House debating this bill at second reading once again.

The bill itself in fact addresses a number of the issues. When the bill was in Parliament last time, my party was prepared to support it, as far as it went. Its inadequacies are some of the areas it does not touch on.

We heard the question earlier from the member for Yukon about whether it adequately addresses the issue, in the 21st century, of mechanisms one can use to steal an identity from someone and impersonate that person. We will know better once we hear from some more of the experts, but the answer to that question is that it probably does not. I am not sure this bill goes far enough to address that issue. It does in part, and I will credit the government for that, but I am not sure it does fully.

There are some good provisions in the bill. We heard questions today around the difficulty of dealing with identity theft in our civil courts, which has been a real problem in terms of their ability to deal with it, but mostly on the part of the individual who has been wronged to be able to identify the person who stole the identity and profited from it to the victim's disadvantage.

Again being critical of the government, there are not adequate police resources deployed in this area. It is interesting that the approach of the government has always been to concentrate on what it calls serious crime, but it is usually stereotypical of criminals who are drug addicts or other addicts, or have serious mental health problems, who commit violent acts.

If we look at the bills that we have gone through, almost innumerable since the Conservative government has been in power, I do not think we could point to more than one bill that addresses white-collar crime. That is mostly what we are talking about. This has a major impact on many lives, but as I said earlier, we are four or five years behind where we should be down that road.

I say that not only because of the inadequacies, and at times, incompetencies of the government, but we also have to look at it in comparison to what other jurisdictions have done. Western Europe has developed technological levels the same as ours. The United States, Australia and New Zealand are way ahead of us in dealing with the issue of identity theft, ahead by at least half a decade, in some cases as much as a decade. We are playing catch-up to a very strong degree, and we are not doing it well because of the manoeuvring of the government.

With regard to the ability of our police officers to deal with investigations in this area, it is extremely limited. A number of them do not have sufficient training, but overall, there simply are not enough police officers in this country to deal with this problem. They need additional training. They do not get it when they go through their basic training to become police officers, whether that be the RCMP, or provincial or municipal police officers. They need quite extensive additional education in order to be able to combat this crime at the police level.

I know from talking to prosecutors that they feel that they need additional resources to prosecute adequately. Some of those resources are in the form of changes to the Criminal Code and they are, again to the credit of the government, reflected in some of the amendments that we would be passing if Bill S-4 eventually goes through. In terms of the financial resources, they are clearly not there in sufficient numbers.

When this bill went through the Senate, I believe it received either five or seven amendments. A couple of them seemed to be, on the surface, just very technical amendments. One was changing the singular to the plural, but I think there was something more there. So that will be one of the issues we will have to address at committee.

In the provisions, the government empowered our criminal courts to make restitution orders not only for the costs of the proceedings but also the direct losses suffered by a victim of identity crimes, including compensation for replacing all the documentation they have to replace.

In some cases, it can be very significant compensation. For instance, if someone is in the process of trying to obtain a mortgage, their identity is stolen and their name shows up on a debtors list through some of the credit-granting agencies, they may lose their mortgage, and by the time they get it straightened out, they may have lost the real estate transaction and thereby suffer quite severely. It could be thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars in damages by the time they straighten it all out and purchase a new building, which by then would be valued higher. They would have taken a real financial hit.

The section that would be amended with regard to restitution would allow an individual to show that evidence to a criminal court and have them order the perpetrator of the crime to compensate the person.

I am sure as people are listening they are thinking that in most cases they would not expect to be able to collect that money back, but the reality with a great deal of identity theft is that, in fact, it is perpetrated by organized crime. So if the individual can be identified, and more importantly, the gang, the organized crime unit, there may be a reasonable opportunity for getting those damages back. The proposed restitution amendment is very appropriate and could turn out to be quite a valuable tool.

With regard to the other sections, the principle sections, creating the offence of identity theft is absolutely crucial. Again, our Criminal Code is so far out of date with regard to the type of criminal activity that is going on here that it is just impossible to use for identity theft as it is being performed now. That is very important, and we are quite supportive of that.

Creating greater penalties and clearer offences for creating identity documents, whether those be ones issued by the government or some other level of government or documents of a commercial nature that would identify a person, in all cases I think these amendments catch that type of activity and clearly make it a crime with appropriate penalties attached.

One of the amendments that came from the Senate was a five-year review that was not in the bill that the government had originally presented. I think that is probably an appropriate amendment, one that we can support. Unfortunately, as so often happens with those reviews, they get done much later than when they are scheduled, in part because the justice committee is so busy. However, we would support that.

I want to address a few comments to the inadequacies of the bill, in particular in the real estate area. I have had some contact with individuals who work in that area. We have had a number of quite notorious cases in Ontario.

In fact, there was a court judgment that I think the average citizen was shocked by, where a couple had bought a condo in the Toronto area and were in residence for I think it was 17 years, but someone else, a criminal, forged documents, created a false identity, went into a lawyer's office and signed documents that put a very large mortgage on that condo, I think it was $200,000, impersonating the real owners. Ultimately this was discovered. The bank took action against the owner. It came out clearly that it was a situation where they had not participated at all in the fraud, but a court in Ontario ruled that in fact the mortgage could be enforced against them.

This ultimately required, I believe, an amendment to the legislation in Ontario retroactively to prevent the consequences of that decision. However, that type of ruling could in fact happen in other provinces, as I understand the situation today.

Bill S-4 does not address that issue at all, as I see it. Again, that is why it is crucial for this to go to committee. Unless I hear opposite from legal experts there, I think this is an area where we need to buttress the bill and put additional provisions in to make it very clear what the penalties will be if that kind of fraud is perpetrated, but also to protect valid legal homeowners and business interests as well.

I have heard from title insurance people in Ontario that there is a current section in the Criminal Code that addresses this in part, but it is way out of date. They are looking for amendments in that regard. It is one of the ones that I think we would have to try to convince the government to support and bring those people in to indicate what the situation is.

I can say that this issue has occupied a significant amount of time of the law societies across all provinces and territories. They have spent, I would say, the better part of the last 10 years trying to get some reasonable controls in place so that type of abuse does not occur.

Lawyers in Ontario, as recently as this past year, have had imposed upon them much greater responsibility to ensure that the person who is sitting at their desk signing legal documents is in fact that person and not pretending to be someone else.

That has taken a great deal of effort by all the law societies. We do not know yet whether it is going to be successful in terms of preventing these types of frauds, but that is what the provinces have done.

Correspondingly, we need to do more at the federal level in the Criminal Code. I think the section of the code that deals with this area and is not addressed at all in the bill, from what I can see, needs to be strengthened quite significantly.

Once we hear more evidence on this, and I am not sure what happened at the Senate as to whether it addressed this problem, I think we are going to find that the whole issue of impersonation appears not to be dealt with strongly enough. We will probably have to look for some amendments to strengthen the bill there.

I will make one final point. We have heard from the banking system and credit card granting companies that they are very interested in coming forward. I am left with the impression that they think there is additional work that needs to be done on Bill S-4 to strengthen it, to try to prevent these types of crimes from happening. Again, it is very important for this to go to the committee for that purpose.

We will be supporting the bill in principle going to the committee, hopefully to strengthen it there and bring it back for third reading and passage and finally get this into place, in spite of all the delays we have had from the government.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I first want to thank the office of my party’s whip for allowing me to spend the next 20 minutes speaking to an exciting bill about identity theft.

This bill is a singular phenomenon in our legislative process. It came from the Senate first. I do not understand why the government did not lay it before this House and the dynamic Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. True, we do have a number of bills to analyze, but it seems to me that it would have been a sign of great deference if we, in our capacity as agents, as representatives and spokespeople for the public, could have had this bill laid before us first.

Identity theft is on the rise in Canada as it is in other countries. This phenomenon can produce some extremely awkward situations for our fellow citizens. Only this morning, I met someone whose credit card had been cloned. Someone had thus had $5,000 stolen from their credit card. It is easy to imagine not only how insecure this can make a person feel, but also what problems they may have in resolving the situation with the financial institutions. Even though most of them agree to reimburse a person who has been the victim of what is, to say the least, a distressing act, it is still an extremely difficult thing to experience and resolve.

The purpose of Bill S-4, which went first to the Senate before being introduced in the House, is to combat identity theft. When we talk about identity theft, we are talking about the unauthorized collecting and use of personal information, ordinarily for criminal purposes. This is nominative information, such as name, date of birth, address, credit card number, social insurance number, or any other personal identification number that can be used to open a bank account, obtain a credit card, have mail forwarded, subscribe to a cell phone service, lease a vehicle or equipment or an office, and even get a job.

With its usual wisdom and judgment, the Bloc Québécois will support this bill, which seems to it to be reasonable and to properly represent Quebec’s interests. We are opposed to bills that do not reflect the values and aspirations of Quebec. We fiercely oppose any bill that attempts to intrude into areas under provincial jurisdiction.

Bill S-4 will mainly create three new offences. First, obtaining and possessing another person’s identity information with the intent of using it in a misleading, deceitful or fraudulent manner in the commission of a crime is an offence liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years. Trafficking in identity information is the second offence. Here we are talking about an offence that targets people who sell information to a third party, knowing or being reckless as to whether it might be used for criminal purposes. The third offence, in addition to obtaining and possessing identity information or trafficking in identity information, relates to possession or illegally trafficking in identity documents issued by the government or that contain information about another person.

Those are the three main offences created by Bill S-4. I would note again that identity theft and the use of personal information for purposes other than those consented to by the person for whom it is intended are on the rise in Canada.

This certainly has to do with the development of our means of communication and new technologies.

Other changes have been made to the bill. If I had my druthers, I would be talking about the conflict in the Middle East, but I am afraid it would not be relevant to what we are debating here and so I will not.

The Criminal Code provides for other offences under Bill S-4. A new offence of redirecting mail or causing it to be redirected is created.

There is also the new offence of the possession of a Canada Post mail key. Such a key would obviously be counterfeit.

Additional forgery offences are proposed, such as trafficking in forged documents and the possession of forged documents with intent to use them.

Another new offence is the re-naming of personation, which is called identity fraud.

The final offence that is added is a further refinement of the meaning of fraudulently personating another person.

I think it is probably my responsibility to mention that the bill provides for two exceptions which shield people from forgery charges if they produce counterfeit documents for secret government operations. This protects public servants who shadow people, engage in electronic eavesdropping or infiltrate groups. These public servants would be protected under this bill when they are tasked by responsible law enforcement agencies with creating and using secret identities in connection with their jobs. If they are hauled before the courts for unauthorized duplication, counterfeiting, forgery, or the appropriation someone’s personality, they have a defence that will make them immune.

The Bloc Québécois does not doubt that this bill is necessary. There is even a burning need for it. We all know people among our friends or in our families who have experienced unauthorized use of their credit card or debit card or some other people who have had their identity appropriated for nefarious ends.

Identity theft is becoming very widespread. The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus estimated that consumers, banks, credit card companies, stores and other businesses lost $2.5 billion as a result of identity theft or the cloning of credit cards or other cash substitutes of this kind.

In 2006, Phone Busters received some 7,800 calls from victims of identity theft reporting total losses of over $16 million for themselves or for businesses. The scope of the problem is apparent.

According to a survey Ipsos-Reid did in 2006, one Canadian in four—so about 25% of the population or 5.7 million Canadians—said they had been a victim of identity theft.

We might wonder why we need the Criminal Code to fight identity theft effectively.

When it is a matter of organized crime, importing and exporting stolen vehicles, drugs, when lengthy investigations are necessary, when we want to address the smuggling of certain products, then we can understand that criminal law is probably the best route under the circumstances. But when it comes to identity theft, credit card cloning and phenomena that often have to do with ownership or the real ownership of identity papers, might civil law not be the better route?

The former Privacy Commissioner told a House of Commons committee that the real solution to identity theft would require civil sanctions. She said:

Civil sanctions... are very easy to prove and easy for citizens [to understand].

She was of course referring to civil law as opposed to criminal law. As we know, criminal law is far more complex because, for each offence, there must be proof that the individual not only intended to plan or to take a criminally reprehensible action, which is termed mens rea, but also actually performed that act, which is termed actus reus. In civil law, the proof is far easier to establish, because it is not proof beyond all reasonable doubt, but proof by balance of probability.

The Privacy Commissioner said:

Civil sanctions... are very easy to prove and easy for citizens [to understand]. Small claims courts [there is one in Quebec and I imagine also in English Canada]...may provide a more easily accessible deterrent to the growing industry of ID theft. This means, of course, that I think the federal government has to work closely with the provinces, because a lot of what happens in terms of ID theft falls within provincial jurisdiction.

This poses a problem, because on matters of civil law, the federal government needs to work closely with the provinces, especially Quebec. Quebec is not only the main place where French is spoken in Canada, but also the only province with a civil law system.

That means that the government will have to be flexible, courteous, kind, open and skilful. I must say that these are not qualities the government has been known for in intergovernmental relations.

We need only consider the cavalier way in which the federal government treated Quebec's demand for financial compensation in connection with the harmonization of the sales tax and the GST. The National Assembly of Quebec had even passed a unanimous motion. We need only look at how the government has handled cultural issues and the reconveyance of land adjacent to the National Assembly of Quebec and on the Plains of Abraham.

This is a government that has chosen the federalism of confrontation. It has chosen to be completely insensitive to complaints and, in some cases, even demands that were unanimously supported by the National Assembly of Quebec.

We could go on and on about the Conservative government's insensitivity to the provinces' complaints. If my colleague, the likeable and charming member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, were here, he would certainly give the example of the Kyoto protocol, which has to do with greenhouse gases, and the battle that Quebec and the National Assembly of Quebec waged together. We repeatedly called on the government to honour the promise made by former Prime Minister Chrétien and the treaty he had signed, so as to respect the efforts of a number of industries that had fought very effectively against greenhouse gases.

But the government did not want to respect the strategy of the Government of Quebec.

We need only think of Senate reform. We know that Quebec's National Assembly is worried about Senate reform. We can certainly have different complaints about this institution given that it is not a democratic chamber. We might also say that the Senate is an outdated institution that is ill-suited to a modern parliamentary system. However, we cannot act unilaterally.

The former intergovernmental affairs minister in the Quebec National Assembly, Benoît Pelletier, was my professor of constitutional law. I remember his lectures with a great deal of nostalgia. He was a very good professor and I was a very good student. I remember that the course was on Mondays at 8:30 a.m., too early in some respects. Professor Pelletier would arrive and was able to present his material in a very interesting and lively way. I owe my considerable knowledge of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to him.

Naturally we had differences of opinion and I exercised my prerogative as a student to express mine in the middle of a class on the unilateral repatriation of the 1982 Constitution which, as you know, was opposed by the Quebec National Assembly. Even the former leader of the Liberal party, Claude Ryan, who could hardly be suspected of sympathizing with the sovereignists, had joined with the Quebec National Assembly to denounce the extremely cavalier way in which the matter had been handled.

All that to say that the Senate and the Quebec National Assembly do not want us to review the selection process for judges unless the provinces can formally participate. We know that the role of the Senate, the upper chamber, is to provide the necessary regional balance within the federation.

A little while ago, I was giving a tour of the House to some visitors from Australia, and I believe I explained to them why the House of Commons has a green carpet and the Senate has a red one. First of all, the Senate is the chamber of the monarchy. The Queen never sets foot in the House of Commons. She instead goes to the Senate, as does her representative, the Governor General, who goes to the Senate to ratify legislation.

This is done in the Senate, and not in the House of Commons. The House of Commons is the house of the people, and traditionally, the green symbolizes the meadows, which is where the people first gathered to oppose the monarchy they felt was too authoritarian and self-congratulatory.

These are examples of how the government did not listen to what we would have liked it to hear from Quebec regarding Senate reforms, the GST or cultural issues. I do not want to skip too quickly over the issue of culture.

The current government chose to recognize Quebec as a nation. We know that Quebec is a nation: we have our own history; we have our own vernacular, the French language; we have a different legal system; we have common aspirations; and we have control over institutions and territory. Those are the main characteristics of a nation. The government recognized Quebec as a nation, but in the absence of concrete action to back this up, we have trouble seeing how we can take it seriously.

I remind the House that the member for Joliette, the Bloc Québécois House leader, is an extremely eloquent man, who shows restraint at all times and is not known for excess. Except, perhaps, when it comes to food. But in general, he is an exceptionally controlled man. Now, when the member for Joliette introduced a bill calling for federally regulated companies to comply with Bill 101, we would have liked to have the support of the government and the official opposition. That would have been a very nice recognition of the fact that Quebec is a nation.

Since my time has expired, I will be pleased to respond to any questions my colleagues might have.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to speak to Bill S-4 today.

I have been here for three and a half years or so, and it seems that we deal with issues that are important to Canadians sporadically and cyclically. This is not the first time I have risen to speak on identity theft legislation. It is not the first time we, as a Chamber, have considered it. It just seems to be a shame that after three and a half years Parliament has not tackled identity theft. Prorogation is one thing that comes to mind.

We have to come together, as parliamentarians, to pass legislation that works in making Canada a better place. We do not need lawyers or members of Parliament or professors to tell us that Canadians at the Tim Hortons on St. George Boulevard in Moncton or Quispamsis are concerned about identity fraud, identity theft.

They may not use those terms, but they know what it is if they are offered a free cruise by some company in the United States if they only put $200 on their credit card and then they have their Visa racked up to its limit. They know what that is. That is good old-fashioned hucksterism, old-fashioned theft, which one only admires. They want us to respond in a modern way to a modern problem which, at its roots, is a very old way of just tricking people. This bill is one that we are pleased to recommend.

Again, all too often we do not recognize the good work of the Senate. On the Senate justice committee, we have les éminences grises, many people who have years of constitutional legal experience. Clearly they have brought to bear amendments or changes to this bill that were needed from the previous bill, which was introduced into Parliament in the last session before the pin was pulled. Some of those examples are modernizing our definition of what constitutes an identification card.

The last clause of the bill says that there shall be a five year review of this legislation. Now many of us, and I know the member for Windsor—Tecumseh would agree, think that the Criminal Code in general should go through a comprehensive review. We seem to be adding layer after layer to the code without any real and thoughtful revision or compilation of its true essence.

In this act, and it seems to be a trend in a number of acts, there is the suggestion that every five years there would be a full review of how we are doing with respect to identity theft or identity fraud. As members know, we did a similar thing with respect to anti-terrorism legislation. We think there should be such a mechanism for the designation of organized crime as well.

In its first proposed subsection, this bill has a hybrid offence, which means summary conviction or indictable. There are some offences that will be below a mandatory limit. If we only went with indictable or serious offences, we might lose a lot of the minor offences that happen every day with respect to identity fraud.

This is not a case where we are just going after the big pilfering of accounts. This bill is designed to catch, as I mentioned, the rack up of $200 on somebody's Visa bill. That would be a summary conviction offence. That part is good.

Discretion is a word we use on this side quite a bit. Discretion should be inherent with judges and prosecutors so they can mold the law to the factual situations they see in our communities every day. Hooray that the Conservative government allows discretion in this bill for prosecutors to proceed by way of summary or indictable offence.

The offence itself states that anyone “who, without lawful excuse, procures to be made, possesses, transfers, sells or offers for sale an identity document that relates” to another person is liable for the crime to a term of up to five years in jail.

The identity document is something else that the Senate added to the debate by further specifying what it should be.

Clearly, these are documents that we know of every day. We see them used every day and there is reticence in the minds and hearts of people as to whether they should be handing over their social insurance number, driver's licence or health insurance card. There is a timidity about giving information that identifies a person, particularly to businesses, but also to government. This includes birth certificates. Death certificates were added. One might ask how it could be identity theft if a death certificate is taken because the person does not exist any more. Clearly, it is an issue of identity fraud, where somebody plays on the personage of an estate or of a dead person.

Also included are passports, citizenship documents and employee identity cards. An expansion allowed by the Senate takes into account that employee identity cards sometimes have so much information behind them, either encoded on them but more likely behind them in terms of the application, that they are almost more valuable than a social insurance card or a driver's licence. It is a very modern suggestion to add it to the list.

Before getting into the guts of the bill, I want to talk about the difference between identity fraud and identity theft. The last bill in the Commons took the approach that we should be more concerned with identity fraud rather than just identity theft. To the average person and to the judge interpreting our laws, identity theft might just say that one is stealing somebody's person, who they are legally, for a bad purpose.

Identity fraud dips in and out of the idea of the entire theft of the identity. It suggests a broader definition, which would encompass all of the stages involved in the crime, such as acquiring, collecting and transferring personal information as well as the actual use of the information. It is much like car theft, a bill that we dealt with earlier today. There are typically many players in the stages of identity theft. It is not a situation where someone leaves a Visa card behind at a store and then someone else tries to use that Visa card at another store. That is clearly a case of identity fraud and identity theft for the purpose of the next purchase.

We are talking about wholesalers of information who gather up student ID cards. We have some students as pages. Mr. Speaker, you probably do not recall as well as the pages do about being a young person at Queen's or U of T and nonchalantly giving all of one's information to the registrar. What if that is privatized? What if it is a private group of companies that amass that information, take those partial identities and sell them to Maclean's to sell magazines?

What if that information is intercepted along the way and used for an improper purpose? It would be very difficult to find out how that happened. The young student might say that he or she has only ever given all of that information to Queen's University, so he or she will blame the university, but that may not be the case at all. The person along the way might be an errant secretary, data information analyst or whomever. Anyone involved in the acquiring, collecting or transferring of the information is hooked by this legislation.

Calls for the amendment to the code in this regard have been going on for some time. Papers have been written for some time on the issues of identity theft and identity fraud. One of the best papers talked about the most fraudulent uses of personal information by identity thieves. Initially, until we took it to this level, this law did not deal with the collection, possession and trafficking of the information. We feel that with the additional offences added by this bill, this is now addressed and adequately covered. We are here in 2009 talking about it.

Identity theft is a serious criminal activity. We have reviewed the bill. Between the speech of the parliamentary secretary and my opening comments about the basis of the bill and the documents that are included in the definition, we know that we have a strong bill. People in the community might ask why it is so urgent. Identity theft and identity fraud are a serious and lucrative industry. How do we as lawmakers have any evidence of that?

The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus has estimated that identity theft costs Canadian consumers, banks and credit card companies, stores and businesses more than $2 billion annually. Two billion dollars used to be a very meaningful number until deficits were running into the area of $50 billion. Two billion dollars use to be the annual cost of a major national program. As I say, $50 billion has probably diluted the meaning of $2 billion, but we know that this is a very serious set of criminal activities. As I mentioned, it is the unauthorized use, collection or trafficking of information. This is the pitfall.

Mr. Speaker, you are an established person, well known in Canada, and you may think this would never happen to you. The worst thing you could do to prevent that from happening to you is to pretend that it cannot happen to you. It is never too late to learn how to safeguard yourself from this type of fraud.

There may be many people in the Canadian public who may think they are protected, because they use a chartered bank, they have known their bankers forever, they have only had one credit card in their lives, they pay their phone bills at city hall, they do everything they can to keep their transactions as discreet, one to one, even personal. According to Louis Robertson, head of the RCMP's Criminal Intelligence Analytical Unit at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Call Centre, identity theft is now probably the most important problem for Canadian consumers.

In 2006 there were 212,000 Canadians who were victimized by identity theft, and their losses, in the use of identity as well as credit card manipulations, ran over $15 billion. Somewhere, depending on whether one subscribes to what PhoneBusters did on a call-in basis of $2 billion, or the RCMP with the $15 billion figure, is the reality about the figures three years ago.

As far as Canadians feeling that they are gripped by identity theft, there was a survey conducted by the McMaster eBusiness Research Centre, MeRC, on behalf of the Ontario Research Network for Electronic Commerce, ORNEC, which was designed to determine the nature and extent of identity theft and fraud so that lawmakers would know that they had the evidence to bring in a bill like this one.

The survey itself, with over 3,000 valid responses, suggests that 6.5% of Canadian adults, or almost 1.7 million people, were the victims of some kind of identity fraud in the last year. Over 20 million hours and more than $150 million was spent to resolve the problems associated with these frauds.

The issue is that this is costing the economy of Canada more than just the money that is pilfered and taken away from Canadian consumers and taxpayers. The survey also counts the millions of hours spent trying to recover the data that was lost and create new data. Anyone who has ever lost his or her wallet knows that it is a nightmare to replace all of the things in it.

More than half of the frauds that have occurred to the Canadian public involve nothing more than unauthorized purchases made with credit cards. That is certainly something we hear about quite often.

If we eliminate credit card fraud as the most popular or well-known instance of fraud with respect to identity, with the incidence rate and costs quoted above, the number of victims is reduced to 700,000, but they still spent 12 million hours, not the 20 million hours, but 12 million hours and more than $110 million of their own money to resolve the problems.

Most victims, 57%, did not know how their personal information was accessed, but when they did know, the identity fraud was most often associated with a business transaction conducted either in person in 25% of the cases, or online in 15% of the cases. This is exactly consistent with what I said earlier. People who are careful about their identity issues try to keep their business transactions discreet and personal, but it is actually more often the case in personal business conducted, that is 25%, than it is for online purchases. That is an important thing for Canadians to be aware of.

This bill captures anyone along the chain involved in taking personal identification information.

Debit card skimming made up 13% of the fraud incidents. Twenty-five per cent of all cases of identity fraud were committed by someone known to the victim. This survey found that to be the case. They were not known by the victim in 7% of the cases.

Very few of the cases of identity fraud were reported to the police, only 13%, or to credit reporting agencies, 6%, or to PhoneBusters, .5%. This indicates that perhaps there is an embarrassment factor. People also might realize, as many people do, that there are inadequate legal provisions to cover the instance, which is the reason we are enacting this law.

If one were to go to police authorities before this law came into effect, the police authorities might well say that this is a civil matter. How often do Canadian citizens hear from police authorities that the fight over the loss of money between the card holder or bank customer and the bank or credit card company is a civil matter and it will not be investigated? That is why there is such low reporting. We hope with this law that there will be more reporting because, frankly, the police will have a better tool to work toward the elimination or the curbing of identity theft and identity fraud.

In closing, the Canadian consumer can protect his or her personal information from physical theft in a number of ways. The government has been adept in some quarters in publicizing a message, at least outside this House, so I would call on the government to take up this campaign of advising and educating members of the public on how to protect themselves from identity fraud and identity theft. It would be disingenuous to suggest that this law is going to eradicate all identity theft and identity fraud.

This is what Canadian consumers can do. I think that the government should lift provisions from this speech for a public education campaign that could be a companion to this bill. These suggestions are from the survey of 3,000 people, of what are the most effective means of protecting one's identity and what have proven to be effective.

Seventy-nine per cent shred financial documents or important documents all or most of the time. Many use a locked mailbox all of the time, or most of the time. Many keep sensitive information in a secure location, such as a locked box or a drawer, all of the time or most of the time.

Many have eliminated or reduced the number of identity documents that they carry with them. How many people do we know who, because of loyalty programs, credit cards, identity documents needed for almost any club, association, building or job, have two wallets or in some cases a wallet so big that it is the size of a desk? One idea is to get rid of unnecessary identity documents.

Many have stopped receiving mailed account statements or have reduced the number of mailed statements that they receive.

Canadian consumers take the following measures to keep their personal information from prying eyes or unauthorized access. One has to do with securing one's information, and one of them has to do with security at the workplace or at a social event where information may be spied upon.

Never or rarely give information over the phone to people claiming to do surveys or offer promotional goods and services, unless one is a Liberal and is asked by a reputable polling agency what one's view on the next election might be. I highly recommend not doing that.

Make sure no one is watching when using an ATM or debit card machine. The public would be wise not to give credit cards to waiters or gas station attendants in the absence of the card holder himself or herself.

Those are just some of the things that consumers can do.

In summary, this is a good bill. It is a shame we did not get at it earlier. It should give law enforcement officials the tools to fight identity fraud. We should be thinking in terms of identity fraud, not just identity theft. We should put out a public education campaign to make sure people do not do things that put them in jeopardy. We should give the Senate a pat on the back for making this bill better.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

;

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join today's second reading debate on Bill S-4, which would amend the Criminal Code to address the serious and ever growing problem of identity theft.

Although introduced in the Senate, the bill's proposed reforms are familiar to hon. members as its predecessor, Bill C-27, which was virtually the same, was introduced in this chamber in the previous Parliament and had received all party support at second reading.

I hope Bill S-4 can similarly receive all party support now and be quickly passed into law. Canadians urgently need the protection it would provide against identity theft, a problem that the Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus has estimated cost Canadian consumers, banks, credit card and other businesses more than $2 billion each year and a problem that has enormous personal and psychological impacts on its victims. I should add that oftentimes the victims of identity theft are the most vulnerable Canadians.

Identity crime encompasses the collection, possession, trafficking and use of identity information belonging to another in committing crimes such as personation, fraud or misuse of debit card or credit card data.

For example, it occurs when somebody pretends to be an account holder in a transaction and uses the true account holder's identity to access his or her credit or actual funds. It also occurs when someone acquires and uses the identity of another to carry out otherwise ordinary transactions, such as to rent an apartment or to buy a cellphone, which are then used as part of a broader criminal scheme. In these instances, if the crime is eventually detected, the trail leads back to the identity of the unfortunate innocent person whose identity was stolen. We know that organized crime and terrorism routinely engage in identity crimes to carry out their criminal operations. I doubt that any one of us, within our constituency, cannot name someone who has been the victim of identity theft.

Bill S-4 proposes to create three new offences that will target the preliminary stages of identity crime and will enable police to lay charges, for example, before the crimes of fraud or impersonation are committed.

The first new offence would be called identity theft and would apply to attaining and possessing identity information with the intent to use the information deceptively, dishonestly or fraudulently in the commission of a crime.

The second new offence is trafficking in identity information, an offence that targets those who transfer or sell information to another person with knowledge of or recklessness toward the possible criminal use of the information. This offence targets the middlemen, and that is those who traffic the stolen identity information from one person to another, but who may not otherwise be involved in the fraud or other crimes in which the information is destined to be used. The trafficking of such stolen identity information is often part of organized crime's identity fraud activities.

The third new offence is for unlawfully possessing or trafficking in crucial government-issued identity documents that pertain to other people.

Each of these new offences would carry a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment and would complement existing Criminal Code offences such as fraud, impersonation and forgery that already prohibit the most harmful consequences of identity abuse.

Bill S-4 proposes other new offences that will complement other existing Criminal Code mail and forgery offences. It will create the new offences of fraudulently redirecting or causing redirection of a person's mail, possessing a counterfeit Canada Post mail key and possessing instruments, often referred to as skimming devices, that are used to extract and copy debit and credit card information.

Bill S-4 would also facilitate law enforcement's investigative activities by adding new offences and certain existing offences to the list of offences for which a wiretap order may be obtained.

Importantly the bill would enable sentencing courts to order an offender to pay restitution to a victim of identity theft or fraud where the victim had incurred expenses related to rehabilitating the reputation and credit history.

Bill S-4 also proposes two exemptions to address potential negative impacts on the undercover work of law enforcement. I want to spend a moment on this aspect of the bill, as this issue attracted significant interest in the Senate. It is important that these are clearly understood for what they are and are not.

The exemptions in clauses 7 and 9 have been carefully crafted to permit the police to obtain and use identity documents in a fictitious name to support undercover activities. Concealing the true identities of undercover police officers is a problem akin to a uniformed officer carrying a sidearm. The law exempts police officers from offences that would otherwise by committed by carrying their guns, for example. The proposed exemptions will do the same thing for undercover officers with respect to identity documents.

Some will argue that these exemptions are unnecessary and inappropriate, since it is already a scheme in the Criminal Code that operates as justification for offences committed by the police during a criminal investigation. While it is true that sections 25.1 to 25.4 of the Criminal Code could be used to justify the use of false identity documents by the police, that approach would require each officer to weigh the proportionality of using the documents each and every time he or she relied upon them.

While this is an appropriate test where the police are engaging in conduct that amounts to an offence that has not been specifically authorized by Parliament, it is the government's view that it would be inappropriate to require the police to rely on this scheme for a discreet, pre-defined activity that is clearly in the public interest. It is essential to keep in mind that the proposed exemptions do not give the police the authority to commit identity theft or other fraudulent activities. Any other offences that an officer may be required to commit in the course of a criminal investigation would have to be justified under the scheme contained in the appropriate sections of the Criminal Code.

Lastly, the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, which undertook a thorough study of the bill, amended it to provide for a five-year parliamentary review. This would provide us with a welcomed opportunity to assess the impact of the reforms in combatting identity theft.

Bill S-4 would provide much needed new tools for Canadian law enforcement and much needed protection for all Canadians against identity theft. I urge all hon. members to consider the most vulnerable in their constituencies when they consider the bill. As we all know, many members of our communities have been the victims of identity theft and the psychological impact of having one's identity stolen or misused can be quite profound.

I urge all hon. members to support the bill and support its swift passage.

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

moved that Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

moved that Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

(Motion deemed adopted and bill read the first time)

Message from the Senate

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I have the honour to inform the House that a message has been received from the Senate informing this House that the Senate has passed the following bill, to which the concurrence of the House is desired: Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identify theft and related misconduct).

Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be able to respond to not just the regular Thursday question about the business of the House for the next week, but indeed to respond to all the questions from my colleague across the way.

In the order that we will dealing with it, today we are debating a motion from the New Democratic Party, which has its supply day today.

Tomorrow we will continue, and hopefully conclude, the third reading stage of Bill C-6, product safety, followed by Bill C-36, the faint hope bill. The backup bill tomorrow will be Bill C-19, the anti-terrorism bill.

Monday, June 15 and Friday, June 19, 2009 shall be allotted days.

On Monday, we will be introducing a bill regarding the Maa-nulth First Nations agreement. It is my intention, provided that I have an agreement from all the other parties, to call and complete that bill on Tuesday. On behalf of that first nation, I express my appreciation to all hon. members and all the parties in the House.

Next week, I will also call Bill C-26, auto theft, for report and third reading. My hope is that we will get that down the hall to get it dealt with at the Senate.

In addition to Bill C-26, we will also consider Bill C-36, the faint hope bill; Bill C-37, National Capital Act; Bill C-38, Nahanni; and Bill C-31, modernizing criminal procedure. All of these bills, as we know, are at second reading.

I am hoping that Bill S-4, identity theft, can be sent over from the Senate expeditiously. If and when it arrives, I will be seeking the cooperation of the opposition to try to expedite that bill in our Chamber.

I might add that despite the assurance of the hon. opposition House leader last week, after we had passed Bill C-33 at all stages, the bill that will extend benefits to allied veterans and their families, I expected the Senate to quickly follow suit. Although sad, it is true that time is running out for some of these veterans and their families. They are waiting to receive these benefits. This bill is not controversial, but the delay of this bill by Liberal senators will become controversial very quickly.

Last week I also mentioned Bill C-29 in my Thursday reply, which the hon. member for Wascana mentioned a minute ago. That is the agricultural loans bill, which will guarantee an estimated $1 billion in loans over the next five years to Canadian farm families and cooperatives. Today the Liberal senators did not grant leave to even consider the bill, let alone agree to adopt it.

Another week has come and gone. I am not sure how the member for Wascana intends to return to farm families in Saskatchewan and explain why his senators in the other place are delaying the passage of Bill C-29.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am only too happy to respond as I do every Thursday, with transparency, openness and in a spirit of co-operation with my colleagues across the way.

Today and tomorrow we will consider Bill C-15, the drug offence bill. However, as my colleague the Minister of Justice noted, the NDP members seem to be unnecessarily dragging the debate on the bill out. We will also consider Bill C-25, truth in sentencing; Bill C-34, protecting victims from sex offenders; Bill C-19, anti-terrorism; and Bill C-30, the Senate ethics bill.

Next week I intend to add to this list, Bill S-4, identity theft; and Bill C-6, consumer product safety.

As always, I will give priority to any bills that have been reported back from our hard-working standing committees.

In the response to the question about the allotted days, within the next week I will be designating Thursday, June 11 as an allotted day.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. Liberal House leader often asks specific questions about specific bills on Thursday, so I hope you will entertain a few comments of my own.

First of all, I would like to recognize that, to date at least, there has been good co-operation from the opposition in moving our legislative agenda forward, not only in this chamber but in the other place as well. I want to thank the opposition for that co-operation.

However, yesterday we passed in this place, at all stages and without debate, Bill C-33, the bill that will extend benefits to allied veterans and their families. For this bill to become law, we need the same co-operation in the Senate. I would urge the opposition House leader to deliver that message to his senators.

I understand that the Governor General is here today and could actually give royal assent to the bill. It would not only be symbolic but a substantial gesture to those veterans who are reflecting on and participating in the 65th anniversary of D-Day on June 6, this weekend.

The other bill I want to specifically mention is Bill C-29, the agricultural loans bill. In one of his Thursday questions, the member for Wascana took an interest in this bill. He suggested, and I quote from Hansard, that “we might be able to dispose of it at all stages”. I appreciate that level of support for this important and time-sensitive bill in the House, but the member needs to coordinate his support with his Senate colleagues in order to get this bill passed and the increased loans made available to our farmers in a timely manner.

Any communication from the member for Wascana and any persuasiveness he may bring to bear upon his Liberal colleagues in the other place would be greatly appreciated by me and the government.

Identity Theft

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to congratulate the government for introducing its recent legislation to combat identity theft in Canada.

Organized crime and modern technology are changing the criminal landscape with new and rapidly-evolving technologies, making identity theft easier than ever. It has become a more serious problem for Canadians than ever before.

In 2004 I introduced a private member's bill to target this very problem. That bill would have made it an offence for a person to be in possession of or to transfer, without lawful excuse, any information or document that could be used to identify another person.

I commend the government for Bill S-4, which will help in combating the complex and serious problem of identity theft. I call on all parties to support this important piece of legislation that stands to benefit all Canadians.

Truth in Sentencing Act

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for St. Catharines.

It is a privilege for me to speak to Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (limiting credit for time spent in pre-sentencing custody).

As members may know, my riding of South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale has been directly affected by the shootings and gang war that has erupted in the Lower Mainland. My constituents are extremely concerned about the ongoing violence and complete disregard gang members have in our community. As the police have clearly indicated, much of this gang warfare is directly related to the drug trade. The guns being used are often smuggled across the border and purchased with the profits from the drug trade, or traded for drugs. Ensuring truth in sentencing, as Bill C-25 would help do, is an important step in ending British Columbia's gang war.

Every member of Parliament brings some experience in other professions and trades to his or her job here. Before I was elected, I served as an attorney for the B.C. legal services. I saw firsthand the impact drugs are having on our young people. I saw firsthand how many young people would turn to a life of crime to feed their drug habits and addictions. Drugs are often the gateway to crime for many career criminals. That is why I feel so strongly that we need to crack down on those who attempt to profit at the expense of our young people. Ensuring that drug pushers and gangsters serve a sentence that matches the seriousness of their crime is an important part of combatting the drug trade.

Upon taking office, our government committed itself to tackling crime and making our streets safer. Our commitment included preventing courts from giving extra credit for pretrial custody for persons denied bail because of their criminal record or for having violated bail.

Under the current system, courts typically take into account certain factors, such as overcrowding in remand centres, lack of rehabilitative programs commonly available in sentence custody, and the fact that time spent in remand does not count toward parole eligibility. This has resulted in courts traditionally awarding a two-for-one credit for time served in pretrial custody.

Now, on rare occasions, the credit awarded has been as high as three for one, especially where the conditions of detention were poor, for example, because of extreme crowding. Although also rare, credit has sometimes been less than two for one where offenders were unlikely to obtain early parole because of their criminal record or because of time spent in remand as a result of a breach of bail conditions.

The general practice of awarding generous credit for time spent in pre-sentencing has resulted in correctional authorities straining to cope with the growing number of people who are held in remand. In many cases, the population in remand centres now exceeds the population found in sentence custody in Canada's provincial and territorial jails.

Provincial attorneys general and correctional ministers have expressed concerns about the growing number of people being held in custody prior to sentencing. They strongly support limiting credit for time served as a way to help reduce the growing size of their remand population. Concerns have also been expressed that this practice has been abused by some accused who delay their trials and sentencing to earn double credit for the time spent in pretrial custody, thereby reducing their sentence.

Canadians have told us loud and clear that they would like to see more truth in sentencing.

I want to refer to a case that happened just last month in Toronto. A man convicted of manslaughter in the death of a nearly one-year-old baby found with 38 wounds was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. However, given that he has already served three years in pretrial detention since he was arrested for this killing, the two-for-one credit will guarantee that he is out on the streets within six months of his conviction.

One way of achieving truth in sentencing is to bring the practice of giving double time credit for pretrial custody to an end.

We are listening to the Canadian public in proposing this legislation. It would provide the courts with greater guidance in sentencing by limiting the amount of credit that courts may grant to convicted criminals for the time they served in custody prior to their sentencing. Bill C-25 would limit the credit ratio to two for one in all cases. However, where circumstances justify it, courts would be able to award a credit of up to one and a half days for every day spent in pre-sentencing custody. In such cases, the court would be required to provide an explanation for those circumstances. These circumstances are not defined in the bill. This is so the courts would have the discretion to consider on a case-by-case basis whether the credit to be awarded for the time spent in pre-sentencing custody should be more than one for one.

For example, we would expect a credit ratio of up to 1.5 to one would be considered where the conditions of detention and remand are extremely poor, or there is a complete absence of programming, or when the trial is unduly delayed by factors not attributable to the accused. However, where accused are remanded for having violated bail or because of their criminal record, the credit would be limited to one day for every day spent in pre-sentencing custody no matter what the remand conditions are.

As a result of this initiative, more offenders would now have a federal sentence of two years or more, and an increased number of offenders who would likely have been sentenced to a federal penitentiary would be spending longer time in federal custody. From a rehabilitation perspective, this time in the federal system would present the opportunity for longer term programming that may have a positive impact on the offender.

Bill C-25 also proposes to require courts to note the sentence that would have been imposed without the credit, the amount of credit awarded and the actual sentence imposed. This requirement would result in greater transparency and consistency and would improve public confidence in the administration of justice.

The proposed legislation is part of a series of criminal justice bills that has been introduced since we took office to help ensure the safety of Canadians. To make Canada safer, we have enacted legislation to get violent and dangerous criminals off our streets. We have cracked down on sexual predators, dangerous offenders and those who use guns to commit crimes. We have given the police more tools and resources to combat crime and to deal with those who drive while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

In the current session we have introduced Bill C-14, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (organized crime and protection of justice system participants), which will provide law enforcement officials and the justice system a better means to address organized crime related activities, in particular, gang members and drive-by shootings.

Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts, was introduced on February 27. It would provide for mandatory jail time for those who produce and sell illegal drugs. The reforms would, however, allow a drug treatment court to suspend a sentence while an addicted accused took an approved treatment program.

We have also introduced legislation in Bill S-4 to provide law enforcement officials with the tools they need to protect Canadian families and businesses from identity theft.

We will continue to introduce legislation to strengthen the justice system. Bill C-25 is an important contribution to this objective.

I appreciate the support of our provincial and territorial partners for this legislative amendment to provide greater truth in sentencing. I can only hope that we can also count on the support of the opposition parties, who have so often stood in the way of any bill that would actually reflect truth in sentencing.

I note the Liberal member for Vancouver South, who has been a loud critic of this government on law and order issues, recently criticized our approach to the issue of sentencing. In the Vancouver Sun on March 26 he is quoted as saying:

If they were genuinely concerned about public safety, they would have actually gone through the system, including corrections and parole board, and attempted to deal with the issue of organized crime. I believe they have not done their job in that regard.

I have three things to say in response to the member, who is a lawyer and a former attorney general of British Columbia.

First, we have introduced four separate bills in the past two months that will help police and prosecutors to crack down on organized crime, and gang and gun war is being waged in the Lower Mainland right now. Will he and his party support those bills?

Second, since forming government in 2006, we have continually introduced legislation to better achieve truth in sentencing. His party opposed these bills in the House and in the Senate. It was not until the Prime Minister threatened an election that the Liberals finally agreed to allow this measure to pass. Why did his party oppose truth in sentencing for so long?

Finally, let us remember that the member for Vancouver South was elected in 2004 and appointed to cabinet. He said that he is concerned about organized crime. He said that he is serious about stopping gun and gang violence. Why was the legislation we are debating today not passed while he was still in power?

I would call on the member and all parties in Parliament to put aside the partisan rhetoric and join us in supporting this common sense legislation.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

moved that Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (limiting credit for time spent in pre-sentencing custody), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the government House leader for seconding this bill. It is very important legislation and is an important part of this government's agenda. We are opening debate on the truth in sentencing act. The amendments to the Criminal Code proposed in this bill will limit the credit that a court may grant a convicted criminal for time served in pre-sentence custody.

As some in the House may be aware, section 719(3) of the Criminal Code allows a court to take account of the time a convicted criminal has spent in pre-sentencing custody in determining the sentence to be imposed. The code does not set out any formula for calculating this credit, but the courts routinely give credit on a two-for-one basis. In many cases the courts give credit on a three-to-one basis. In other words, for every day a convicted offender has spent in remand, the court will deduct from the sentence it otherwise would impose, two or three days.

Explanations for the length of a sentence are usually provided in open court at the time of sentencing. However, judges are not required to explain the basis for their decision to award pre-sentence credit. As a result, they do not always do so and this deprives the public of information about the extent of the pre-sentence detention. It leaves people in the dark about why the detention should allow a convicted criminal to receive what is most often considered to be a discounted sentence. This creates the impression that offenders are getting more lenient sentences than they deserve.

There is a concern that the current practice of awarding generous credit for pre-sentence custody may be encouraging some of those accused to abuse the court process by deliberately choosing to stay in remand in the hope of getting a shorter term of imprisonment once they have been awarded credit for time served.

For ordinary Canadians, it is hard to understand how such sentences comply with the fundamental purposes of sentencing, which is to denounce unlawful conduct, deter the offender from committing other offences and protect society by keeping convicted criminals off the streets.

The practice of awarding generous credit erodes public confidence in the integrity of the justice system. It also undermines the commitment of the government to enhance the safety and security of Canadians by keeping violent or repeat offenders in custody for longer periods.

Those who defend the current practice note that credit for pre-sentence custody compensates for the fact that the time a convicted criminal has spent in remand does not count toward eligibility for full parole or statutory release.

At present, a prison inmate is eligible for full parole after one-third of the sentence has been served. If parole is not granted, that same inmate will likely be set free on statutory release at the two-thirds point in the sentence. What this means in practice is that if someone is released on full parole at the one-third point in the sentence, every day he or she has served in prison will have counted, in effect, for three days.

If parole is denied and at the same time a person is set free on statutory release at the two-thirds point in the sentence, every day he or she has served in prison will have counted, in effect, as a day and a half.

The current system of presumptive release that currently underpins Canada's approach to corrections has recently been the subject of an exhaustive review by an independent panel. This panel's report entitled “A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety” was delivered by my colleague, the former minister of public safety, in October 2007.

Among other things, the independent review panel recommended that statutory release be entirely eliminated and that Canada move toward a system of earned parole. The goal is to encourage prison inmates to sincerely apply themselves to the rehabilitative programs available to them in prison.

The practice of awarding generous credit for pre-sentence custody cannot rest on the foundation of a statutory release and parole system that has itself been subject to strong and impartial criticism and that may therefore be significantly changed in the future. However, those who defend the current practice note that the generous credit for pre-sentencing custody is also designed to take into account such factors as overcrowding and lack of rehabilitative programming for inmates in remand centres.

I have received many letters and representations from concerned Canadians on the issue of pre-sentencing custody credit. All too often they cite situations where violent offenders are set free after having served a relatively short prison term because a court has awarded them two or three to one credit for pre-sentence custody. One writer commented that if one of the purposes of incarceration is to reform criminals, then the current practice of awarding two for one is a dismal failure. He writes:

The rationale is that the criminal has been deprived of the benefits of programs that would be made available to him in a regular penitentiary. So, in addition to releasing him back into society without these rehabilitating programs, we send him out twice as fast.

It is hard to disagree with that.

Not only does the current practice deprive offenders of the prison programs that might help to keep them out of jail in the future, it also fails to punish them adequately for the deeds that led to their convictions in the first place. This is especially the case of those offenders who have been denied bail and sent to a remand centre because of their past criminal records or because they have violated their bail conditions.

Bad behaviour should not be rewarded.

This government is on record as having pledged to address this issue, something that the bill would do. We have tabled Bill C-25 to strictly limit the amount of credit the courts may grant to convicted criminals for the time they have served in custody prior to their sentencing.

Our government is following through on its commitment to ensure that individuals found guilty of crimes serve a sentence that reflects the severity of those crimes.

This bill would accomplish a number of important objectives. It would deliver on our promise to provide truth in sentencing. It would help to unclog our court system and avoid costly delays and would do this by providing the courts with clear guidance and limits for granting credit for time served.

The Criminal Code amendments tabled on March 27 clearly stipulate that the general rule should be one day credit for each day served in pre-sentence custody. If circumstances justify it, credit may be given at a ratio of up to one and a half days for each day served. In such cases, however, the courts would be required to explain the circumstances that warrant departing from the general rule of one to one credit. This would allow the judge the discretion to award credit of up to one and half to one in appropriate cases. That being said, when it comes to offenders who have violated bail or who have been denied bail because of their criminal record, credit for time served would be strictly limited to a one to one ratio without exception.

I want to repeat that no extra credit would be granted under any circumstances for repeat offenders or those who have violated their bail conditions.

The proposed amendments would provide greater certainty and clarity in sentencing. It would require the courts to provide written justification for any credit granted beyond the one to one ratio. The courts would also be required to state in the record the amount of time spent in custody, the term of imprisonment that would be imposed before any credit is granted, the amount of time credited and the sentence imposed. Canadians would no longer be left wondering about how a particular sentence has been arrived at in a particular case.

Although sentencing issues are complex, they are issues of utmost importance to this government. We need to work closely with our provincial and territorial partners to deal with the many issues associated with sentencing reform.

Extra credit for time spent in pre-sentence custody is widely seen as one of several factors that have contributed to significant increases in the remand population in the last few years. This significant growth has put provincial and territorial institutions under considerable pressure.

Since 2007, more people have been held in provincial and territorial remand centres than were serving sentences in provincial and territorial jails. Overall, remanded accused now represent about 60% of admissions to provincial and territorial jails.

Several factors are at work that may contribute to the fact that the remand population is rising. Across Canada, court cases are becoming more complex due partly to the rise in the number of complex drug and organized crime related prosecutions. Many cases now involve 10 and 20 appearances before the courts. Longer processing times mean longer stays in remand.

For example, in 1994-95 about one-third of those in remand were being held for more than a week. Ten years later, however, those held for more than a week had grown to almost half of the remand population. This is a significant drain on resources at a time when the justice system is already under strain with an increasingly heavy workload.

Trials are becoming longer which also increases the amount of time an accused is remanded. All of this adds up to an increase in the remand population. The result is that offenders spend less time in sentenced custody because they spend too long in remand, which is why the provinces and territories welcome the reforms contained in Bill C-25.

Many of my colleagues and I stood with provincial attorneys general and solicitors general when our government announced the introduction of Bill C-25 on March 25. I was in British Columbia with the attorney general, Wally Oppal; the mayor of Surrey, Dianne Watts; the Vancouver police chief, Jim Chu; and other police representatives, including a member of the Canadian Police Association. This all took place at the Surrey remand centre. I was so pleased to be joined by a number of my colleagues who have been very supportive of this initiative and all of the initiatives that this government has taken to combat crime.

I hope I am not embarrassing him when I say that I was pleased to be there with the member for North Vancouver, and I thank him for his support. I thank the chairman of the justice committee, the member for Abbotsford, and one of the women who has been pushing this issue for quite some time, the member for Fleetwood—Port Kells. Mr. Speaker, you know of her commitment.

I was also pleased to be joined on that date by the member for Surrey North who has been very supportive of our criminal law agenda. Members will remember a number of occasions when she has posed questions to me during question period all related to getting tough on crime and sending out the right message. I thanked her on that day and I am pleased that she has joined with me again today. I know of her commitment in this area.

Since the day we made that announcement, we have had overwhelming support from attorneys general and solicitors general because they believe that Bill C-25 will help them cope with the growing number of accused who are awaiting sentencing while housed in their jails. They believe it will help them stem the tide of increased costs due to a growing demand, which is why the truth in sentencing bill is very important to them.

At a meeting of federal, provincial and territorial ministers held last September, my counterparts unanimously encouraged us to proceed with amendments similar to those seen in the truth and sentencing bill and they indicated that this was a top priority for them.

These are important reforms. Canadians have been waiting for a long time. Many say that offenders too often slip through the fingers of out justice system without serving adequate time. As a result, Canadians have been demanding change. They believe there must be more truth in sentencing and that the sentence one gets is the sentence one should serve. This approach set out in Bill C-25 would help restore the people's confidence in the criminal justice system. In the oft-repeated phrase, justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

This approach is also more consistent with the situation found in other common-law countries where awarding a credit for pre-sentence custody is far less generous than in Canada. One concern expressed by some critics is that Bill C-25 is unfair because it does not adequately recognize the pre-sentence custody that often occurs in overcrowded institutions that lack opportunities for education and treatment. It is not our intention that accused persons be encouraged to remain in remand any longer than is absolutely necessary. Rather, it is our intention that accused persons proceed to trial with as little delay as possible and, if convicted and given a custodial sentence, that they may be sent to prisons that are not overcrowded and offer more opportunities for education and treatment.

In that regard, my department has been working closely with provinces, territories and members of the bench and the bar to identify practical and effective ways to improve the efficiency of the courts to ensure they are able to meet the challenges now confronting them.

The approach taken in the truth in sentencing bill should encourage good conduct by accused persons while on bail and should encourage them to seek an early trial where possible and where appropriate to enter an early guilty plea. Above all, it would lead to greater clarity across Canada regarding the relationship between the sentencing posed on an offender and the credit for pre-sentence custody.

These changes are long overdue but late is better than never. Time and time again, Canadians have said that they want a strong criminal justice system. They want us to move quickly and decisively to tackle violent crime.

Our government is committed to protecting Canada's citizens and making those streets safer. We will continue doing what Canadians expect and deserve and that is making laws that will keep our communities and streets safer. We promised to tackle crime and strengthen security when we formed the government and we have kept our word.

Since we took office, we have brought forward several key pieces of legislation, including the Tackling Violent Crime Act, which, among other things, signals an end to lenient penalties for those who commit serious or violent gun crimes. Our government has a long list of accomplishments in tackling crime over the last two years. We passed legislation to increase penalties for those convicted of street racing. We passed legislation that ends house arrest for serious personal injury and violent offences, including sexual assault.

As members know, we recently brought in reforms to address the problems of organized crime, Bill C-14, and introduced Bill C-15 to provide mandatory sentencing for serious drug offences. On March 31, we introduced in the Senate Bill S-4, the bill to protect Canadians against the rapidly increasing crime of identity theft.

We are proud of those changes. We are standing up for Canadians who have urged us to get tough on crime. Canadians across the country have told us that they want us to take action on crime and, with this legislation, we are delivering. We cannot do this job alone. I greatly appreciate the support I have received from my provincial and territorial counterparts but more is needed. I call on all members of the House of Commons and members of the Senate to expedite the passage of this bill, indeed all the bills that are part of our ambitious justice agenda. Canadians are watching this and this is what they expect. I hope all members will agree that this is what Canadians deserve.