Mr. Speaker, we talked about this quite a bit in committee after I proposed an amendment that was deemed inadmissible by my hon. colleague’s seatmate. I do not hold it against him, though, because we thought that would happen.
I still brought forward the amendment so that it could be discussed. People are worried about this. It was pointed out that there are ongoing discussions about identity theft in general at the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Surely this committee—and I imagine the same will be true of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights at some point—can produce a specific proposal to make identity theft illegal and a criminal offence in all cases. A person cannot make use of someone else’s identity, regardless of the reason or whether there was fraud or not. It should be a punishable crime in itself just to try to steal someone else’s identity or collect information in order to use someone else’s identity.
I have been wondering how the financial institutions’ responsibility could be included in the current legislation on identity theft. The government has a certain power of initiative in this area and I encourage it to think about this problem and draw up regulations or work together with the banks, at least on a temporary basis, so that they assume their responsibilities on their own. Government and finance department officials, among others, placed considerable emphasis in committee on self-regulation, on how unnecessary it was to pass legislation on everything that arose, and on how they were going to work together with the banking industry so that it would adopt and implement its own rules.
The advantage of this approach is obviously that it is faster than the legislative route. I encourage the government, therefore, to put pressure on the financial institutions. I encourage these institutions to add voluntarily to their code of conduct that they will hold themselves responsible for any cases of identity theft or mortgage fraud that might arise as a result of such theft. That would make it unnecessary for us to legislate. It would show their sense of responsibility, make them accountable, and force them to be more careful at all times. Once someone is responsible for any future fraud, they pay more attention because they will have to pay. It is the same for the financial institutions.