Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, committee, for the invitation to testify today.
I've been working on identity theft for over 10 years now, and it's been a long hard trod to get individuals to pay attention to the severity of the issue across the country. I applaud this committee for taking this on and putting this study together. I think it's very timely and very important for the Canadian public, so I want to say thank you.
My name is Kevin Scott, and I have worked on identity theft, in a variety of different forms, over the past 10 years. I'm the president and founder of the Canadian Identity Theft Support Centre.
With me today is Jim Dorey. He's the executive director of the Canadian Identity Theft Support Centre. He's basically responsible for the day-to-day actions and responsibilities of the centre. Jim will be jumping in during the presentation and going a little more in depth on what we do on a day-to-day basis.
I think it's important, first, for me to give a bit of background of who we are and where we came from, so the committee has an understanding of our mission and our goals.
We put together a study, back in 2004, which examined the federal privacy law and identity theft, how the two related, and how federal law could help stem some of the identity theft in Canada. That was a report that was funded by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's office, and it was done by the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. We then moved forward and decided that we needed to get more attention to the issues, so we used the report to develop a conference, in 2008. This conference was held in Vancouver, British Columbia. We had over 200 experts from across the country: private sector, law enforcement, and government. It was an extremely successful conference.
We looked at three different streams in that conference. The first stream was law enforcement and law; the second stream was technology and identity theft, and the third was victims. The first two streams had very clear outcomes and had organizations and individuals who were ready to take them on and move forward with them. The findings from the conference on victims was a very different story because there was nobody working on support in Canada for victims of identity theft.
We were quite shocked to find this out. We kind of knew it when we went in, but it was very much reinforced as we heard from individuals across the country. We went to the Department of Justice and told them of the issue, the situation, and they were able to give us a small grant of about $70,000 to do a feasibility study to start putting together a support centre for victims.
We did that over an eight-month period, and then came back and said, “This is very necessary. There's opportunity, and there's several different private sector government agencies who would be very supportive of this”. So we moved forward and began putting together the centre, putting together our materials, our legal backgrounds, and also developing a very close working relationship with the Identity Theft Resource Center, in San Diego, which has been running for 20 years. This is a very impressive organization. It has looked at identity theft on the victim's side and said that in a more severe case of identity theft, it can take up to 400 hours for an individual to regain control of their identity. The emotional impact of that is mind boggling—I'll just say that.
That relationship was developed. We put together all of our materials, working very closely with Pippa Lawson, who I know was at the committee about a month ago. She helped take the U.S. system and Candianize it, and basically we were able to put together all of the materials that we required to move forward.
The centre was then launched, in June 2012. That was here in Ottawa, and also in Vancouver. It was a very successful launch. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada was our keynote speaker for that, and she was very eloquent and was able to bring a lot of attention to the issues. We were on the front page of almost every newspaper in Canada.
Now, I've taken the time on my plane ride here to read the testimony of everybody who has appeared in front of the committee, and I have to say that the work that individuals are doing to reduce and try to modify systems within their organizations, their ministries, is every important. But the one thing that I don't see in the record thus far is the victim's side. That's what Jim Dorey and I hope to bring to you today, talking about those victims and what they're going through and what type of support they need.
As I alluded to a moment ago, when an individual is a victim of identity theft, their life becomes a spiral of confusion. They don't know where to turn, they don't know what to do, and they don't know how to get out of the maze—I think is the best way to put it. There are 15 to 20 different agencies, organizations, banks, and so on that an individual needs to speak with to start getting the issue under control. Each one of these different agencies requires a different form, a different explanation, and a different type of format to explain the issue.
Now, when an individual is going through the emotional impact of identity theft, trying to sort through all of these different forms and requirements, they just get to a point of complete overload. So with that 400 hours of confusion, the U.S. organization has been able to streamline their process down to 15 to 20 hours with a very systematic tool kit of forms, scripts, and so on to basically get the individual out of this quagmire.
I think it's probably best to throw it over to Jim Dorey, who can talk to you about what that process is, how we've made it Canadian, and how he deals with these individuals on a day-to-day basis.