Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague from Vaudreuil-Soulanges for her excellent question. It gives me the opportunity to add a couple of very important points that I did not have time to make earlier.
I heard the Minister of Justice say earlier that we must pass this bill quickly. However, we must take the time to debate things and see if more needs to be done. We need to be clearer about what we are trying to accomplish.
When it comes to identity theft, this government is far from setting an example, and that is frightening. I would remind the House that in 2006—not so long ago—the Auditor General estimated that there were 2.9 million extra social insurance cards out there. We are talking about nearly 3 million cards. No one would make such a fuss for 100,000. So, 3 million extra social insurance cards have been out there since 2006, and no one knows where they are. Yet a social insurance card can get you places. It allows you to open a bank account, to have a job, to get a driver's licence, even to get a passport. And there are 3 million out there, but no one knows where. That was in 2006.
Is this government setting a good example? No. More recently, on September 9, 2009, the front page of La Presse announced that 47,000 passports disappeared in 2008, four times more than in 2003. Is that normal? So we have 47,000 passports and 2.9 million social insurance cards. That is not all; there is more. You too will be frightened, Mr. Speaker. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority lost some of its uniforms. This is serious. It lost a total of 1,127 articles, which were reported lost or stolen, including 91 badges, 78 shirts, 32 windbreakers and 25 sweaters, all of which had CATSA's logo on them. This is extremely worrisome, for is there any better way to usurp someone's identity than by taking the uniform of someone in a position of authority in air safety? That is remarkable.
In 2002 the RCMP investigated the theft of hundreds of forms from five Canada Immigration Centres and the unauthorized querying of a police data bank by Citizenship and Immigration Canada employees.
There are other examples, but I see I am running out of time.
In closing, the Conservative government is not setting the example it should.