Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As you mentioned, my name is Bernard Courtois. I am the President and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Canada, the national association of the information technology and communications industry. We are very interested in seeing our economy develop into a digital, Internet economy.
We've been working for quite a while on all the issues around how Canada should make sure that it secures its place for success in the way that the global economy is going, becoming an Internet economy and a digital economy. We participated, along with many other people around our industry and others, in a big forum last June on trying to set an agenda for leadership in the digital economy for Canada.
There have been numerous gatherings around this issue. Every time we get people to look at this, the whole issue of confidence in the Internet and the digital economy as an economic instrument is front and centre. Confidence means that users have to have a sense that our laws are adapted to reflect these new realities, including the new threats that have come about because of the misuse of technology.
There is no doubt that for quite some time the whole issue of identity theft and identity fraud has been identified as a very important danger to protect Canadians against. Therefore, we welcome this bill and the approach it takes to tackle this problem. This includes a number of aspects: an open-ended list of what may be involved in identity documents and so forth, along with the possibility of reviewing the bill in five years. This is an area that moves so fast, we will want to live through this experience and see whether any adjustments should be made, particularly in the area of reasonable inference and whether that is enough to really capture and catch the behaviour that we want to catch, or whether at some point the capturing of someone else's identity information is, in and of itself, a sufficient inference.
On the whole, what we're here to do is to say that our association, which represents the industry most intimately involved with creating the Internet or bringing it to Canadians and the technology that makes it work, views this bill as an important element. We are quite supportive of getting it passed as soon as possible.
Those are my introductory comments. Thank you.