Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to one of the fastest growing criminal threats to Canadians: identity theft.
My constituents in Newton—North Delta and all Canadians have good reason to worry about identity theft. The cost of losing personal information can be crippling and can affect victims for years to come.
People can be repeatedly victimized before they know. They might not know they are a victim until they apply for credit or start receiving calls from debt collectors. However, by then it is often too late. Their credit has been destroyed and it is hard to restore it. Victims encounter many difficulties restoring their reputation and recovering their losses. Many are left traumatized.
Identity theft has many victims. When a person's identity is stolen, commercial and financial institutions may cover the losses and governments may be tricked into providing documents or benefits.
Identity theft can take many forms, from credit card abuse to fraudulent real estate transactions, even impersonating someone to commit a crime. Thieves can take over bank accounts, obtain loans, transfer land titles and more. They can gather personal information in many ways, from mail theft to high tech computer hacks. It is not hard to find websites offering credit card data for sale or even hard drives with personal information for sale on eBay.
Identity theft often leads to even worse crimes. Our police have seen a growing trend of identity theft being used to further other types of crime, from fraud to organized crime. Gangs like identity theft because of the low risk of detection and the chance of high rewards. New technology has made it even easier to collect personal information and for criminals to cover their tracks.
Identity theft affects more and more Canadians. Seventy-three per cent of Canadians are concerned about becoming victims of identity theft. Twenty-eight per cent say that they were or someone they know was a victim. Last year almost 8,000 victims reported losses of $16 million and even more cases go unreported every day. Identity theft is estimated to cost Canadian consumers and businesses more than $2 billion a year.
The Liberal Party is proud that it created cutting edge laws to protect consumers' privacy eight years ago. The member for Calgary Centre-North wrote that this legislation “continues to merit its long-standing reputation as a world-class model for the protection of personal information in the private sector”.
The idea is simple: criminals cannot steal from people what they do not have. By making companies collect only the information they need, their data is less valuable to thieves. We also required companies to adopt safeguards for sensitive information.
Unfortunately, companies do not always comply. There are too many stories of the over-collection of personal information and inexcusable security breaches. Worse, companies do not have to inform consumers if their data is compromised. Canadians may not find out that their personal information has been stolen until it is used for a theft.
As the representative of my constituents in Newton—North Delta, I am committed to fighting crime and the causes of crime. We have to both encourage people to obey the law and punish them if they do not.
I have spoken with seniors in my riding and they tell me that it is not enough to punish crime. They say that we need to stop crime before it happens. They have a better plan to fight crime than the government.
Crime is a complicated problem and simplistic solutions do not get the job done. We need a comprehensive and effective approach to every aspect of fighting crime: prevention, catching criminals, convicting them and then rehabilitating them. We must put more police officers on our streets, more prosecutors in the courts , and more tools in the hands of the police.
I have been imploring the government to do more. The City of Vancouver has put more police on the streets of Vancouver than the Conservative government has put across this whole country. That is not enough.
To prevent identity theft, we must change private sector privacy laws to force companies to notify consumers when their personal information gets stolen. Breach notification will empower consumers. If a person's social insurance number gets into the wrong hands, the person deserve to find out about it so the person can avoid becoming a victim. This would also cause businesses to take the security of their customer's information more seriously. National breach notification would put Canada ahead of the United States where over half of all states have these laws.
Canada also needs to implement the recommendations of the federal task force on spam, recommendations that have been ignored by the present government. Spam clutters the mailbox of every Canadian and can trick people into revealing personal information. Canada has fallen behind. We are the only G-8 country without anti-spam legislation. Of the top 10 worst countries for originating spam, Canada is number six.
Bill C-27 would make it an offence to obtain, possess or traffic in other people's identity information if it is to be used in a crime. While there are already offences in the Criminal Code that cover the misuse of someone else's personal identity information, there are no offences to cover the steps that lead up to identity fraud: the collecting, possession and trafficking in identity information. Bill C-27 addresses this gap and I support this.
However, Bill C-27 does not do enough. It does not require data breach notification. It does not help the victims recover their reputations. It does not fight the growth of spam. It does not fix the rules on the collection of personal information by the government and private enterprise. It does not criminalize pretexting when a fraudster tries to obtain personal information about an individual by posing as him or her or someone authorized to have this information.
Experts agree that the government has not done enough. Philippa Lawson, the director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, said, “if the government is serious about this issue, we expect to see much more in the way of law and policy reform The Privacy Commissioner said that “the federal government must develop a broad-based strategy for tackling this type of fraud”.
The government has not shown Canadians that it believes its own rhetoric and introduced better accountability and stronger systems to protect their personal information.
The way forward is clear. The police need more resources to investigate identity theft and capture criminals. We need more police devoted to white collar crime. Our police need more training to keep up with criminals. We need to fix the lack of coordination between different government departments, the provinces, law enforcement and the private sector. We need basic education to teach Canadians about identity theft and how to avoid it.
Bill C-27 is a useful first step but if the government is serious about fighting identity theft it will need to do a lot more for Canadians.