Mr. Speaker, during the member's speech I believe he referred to me and to some of the information I provided to the House in an earlier speech. This information had to do with social insurance numbers.
He apparently said that he contacted the department and it provided information explaining away the five million extra social insurance numbers. He provided somewhat of a defence on behalf of the department for the problems with the social insurance registry.
However it is important to point out that after five years the government is only now coming up with some kind of an argument for all these extra social insurance numbers. The government also cannot tell us how many fraudulent social insurance numbers are out there. It is guesstimating about whether some of these numbers are being used in a way that will sustain the system. Some of them are dormant, as some people are out of the country, but officials have admitted that they cannot account for hundreds of thousands of these numbers, even if they could account for four million.
Officials also acknowledge that there is a problem in the way they gather information so people can actually get a social insurance number. When people produce a birth certificate that has no picture on it, it is quite possible for them to defraud the system.