Madam Speaker, I am pleased to indicate to the House my support for Bill S-4, as I think all members of the House have indicated today and previously. I do not recall very much dissent, although some caution is urged in relation to one or two sections of the bill.
The bill has been a long time coming. I guess it is pretty clear on the record that we are at third reading stage. Somebody offered earlier today to expedite its passage but it would be pretty tough to expedite it much faster than the speed at which it is already going. I do not know whether I am the last speaker but at some point today the debate will end, the House will adopt the bill and it will be over. I congratulate all those who wanted to expedite it because they will get their wish.
As members have said, the concept behind the bill has been in the drafting stage for about 10 years. There were complexities that did delay it in the early years. There was a bit of a moving target with respect to personal information. This is an area of evolving legislative activity. I think it was the intention of the original drafters that we get a good definition of what “personal identity information” is, and the bill has a pretty good definition, which I will get to later in my remarks.
I recall going through the bill very carefully at the justice committee one or two Parliaments ago. The bill, however, was always pre-empted by a parliamentary dissolution. It was not that nobody wanted to see it pass. It was always a problem of Parliament ending in a dissolution before the bill was fully passed.
However, there is a section that has created an offence involving the possession of a Canada Post mailbox key. This type of key is the one postal workers use when they distribute and pick up mail on the street. All Canadians are familiar with those big post boxes and those big keys that the postal workers use. I think the original intention was to create an offence for anyone who was in possession, without authority, of one of those keys.
Now, that makes sense. Why did it take us 100 years to get to this point? I am not sure. Maybe it is because the post office always did a pretty good job of keeping control of its keys. However, it has become a problem, which is the basis for this proposed offence. I think this has been expanded to include possession of any key that would open a post box receptacle, which means my post box key and the keys of everyone here. There are probably millions of post box keys across the country.
I think somebody has thought this out, but it is not an offence just to be in possession of somebody else's post box key. There needs to be an intent to use it fraudulently or to commit an offence described in the section. However, had I had such an opportunity at committee, I would have scrutinized very carefully the implications of creating a new offence that made it an offence simply to be in possession, with a fraudulent intention, of something that is so common. I could say that if we are going to make it an offence to possess someone's little mailbox key, then why do we not make it an offence to possess somebody's house key? The house has much more value than a post box. Here we may have unwittingly treaded into a territory that we have not thought through.
However, in any event, it is in the bill and I will not object to it but my gut tells me that down the road, at some point in time, there will be a case and a fact scenario that will raise potential issues with respect to somebody's possession of a simple mailbox key. I am not talking about the big post office key. I am just talking about an ordinary residence or apartment building mailbox key. We all have them.
I am very pleased to see that in the bill we grappled with and nailed by definition the concept of credit card and debit card in a way that would allow police and authorities to clearly identify an offence when it happens. Up to now, a credit card was just a piece of plastic with some information printed on it but we all regard credit cards as something more than that. It is our access to credit, cash or whatever. Up to when we started amending the Criminal Code, that little piece of plastic was just a piece of plastic. The bill, essentially, completes the initiative to place an intrinsic legal value on the information contained on the credit card. Credit and debit cards have magnetic strips with personal information, credit information, digital information and now they also have chips, with who knows how much information, but all intended to better secure the credit realm, if I can put it that way.
Also, the bill gets into the issue of identifying and defining the personal identification number, the PIN, that is a necessary partner to some types of credit or debit access, either person-to-person or machine-person-to-machine. That would be helpful for the police as they carry out investigations. For example, if there is a reason to arrest somebody who is suspected of being involved in a fraud or a crime and that person was in possession of what appeared to be PINs, up to now, those numbers would just be numbers and it is actually not an offence to be in possession of a bunch of numbers. However, if they could be identified as personal identification numbers to be used in association with credit and debit transactions, it is a new offence, and that is a good thing.
Up to now, when there was theft from the mail, the police, authorities and prosecutors always had difficulty trying to figure out who was the owner of the mail when it was stolen. Certainly when it is in the possession of the post office, there were offences dealing with theft from the mail from the post office, but what if the post office had not taken possession of it yet or what if the post office had already delivered it to a residence? After it has been delivered by the post office to a box sitting outside a front door somewhere, is that theft from the mail or is it theft from somebody in the house? What if the name on the letter does not match the name of the owner of the house? These were always problems.
I suppose I could ask why it has taken us 100 years to figure this one out, but the answer is that in the good old days, in the early 1900s, maybe there was not so much theft from the mail. Maybe it was not a big problem. However, the police and prosecutors have identified it now as a weakness in public security. We have managed to clarify that so mail that is sitting delivered to a house, a residence or in a box, not only is the key somewhat protected but so is the mail and that will allow better police enforcement.
I want to raise a concern, as my friend from Windsor—Tecumseh did earlier, about the exemption of public officers from prosecution when they use a forgery technique in their work for public safety.
The exemption is somewhat circumscribed. The alleged offence, and only an alleged offence because it says they are exempt, must be committed for the sole purpose of establishing or maintaining a covert identity for use in the course of the public officer’s duties or employment. As my friend pointed out earlier, the term “public officer” is quite a broad definition. One wonders why this particular exemption could not have been folded into section 25 or subsection 25(1) of the Criminal Code where there are statutory exemptions from prosecution for police or public officers in the course of their duties.
The most common case one thinks of is the work of an undercover police officer who assumes a false identity for the purpose of a covert undercover investigation. Citizens accept that. However, under section 25 of the Criminal Code when a public officer commits an act that would otherwise be a criminal offence, there must be a record of it and a justification for it in writing. The exemption claimed by the officer and agreed to by the police force that he or she is a part of is recorded in the House. A report is introduced in the House every year that describes each and every instance of exemption of a police officer from prosecution when an act is committed that would otherwise be a criminal offence.
One wonders why we would not require this type of exemption in this bill, clause 368.2, to be included in similar reports. Some people will say that there is just too much police and public officer covert activity going on and that instead of having a small volume filed in the House of Commons, the report would be 12 or 24 inches thick. That is possible, which is why I wanted to put it on the record and join my friend who spoke earlier on this as raising a possible concern.
The public should be much more satisfied that the bill has managed to bring in protection for a whole lot of personal identity techniques and information, which I will read for the record. The identity information protected includes: a fingerprint, voice print, retina image, iris image, DNA profile, name, address, date of birth, written signature, electronic signature, digital signature, user name, credit card number, debit card number, financial institution account number, passport number, social insurance number, health insurance number, driver’s licence number or a password.
I wanted to get those on the record because so many people routinely use all of those things. I wanted the record to show that this legislative amendment captured all of those things and gave people at least some protection under the Criminal Code. It does not mean that there will not be thefts of identity. It just means that the code identifies these things as protected items and, if they are stolen, used or misused, the prosecution will be easier and more focused.
Will it deter the bad guys? We do not know. The bad guys will always be out there looking for a chance to steal and plunder, although we hope there are fewer and fewer of them out there, but at least this amendment attempts to capture all of the things we have become used to as personal identity items.
The bill has a sentencing component. I am very pleased it does not engage in this mindless political posturing of throwing the book at those convicted with mandatory minimums. The bill quite properly proposes sentencing ranges for those convicted of these offences. Sometimes it is up to five years, or it is up to 10 years, or it is by indictment or it is by summary conviction, but the sentencing ranges look appropriate.
As we have always done in our Canadian justice system, and in most justice systems in the modern world, the decision making on sentencing is left to informed judges. I wanted to make this point because a number of the criminal law amendment bills we are looking at in this Parliament, and in the previous Parliament, all seem to have as their objective the rewriting of the sentencing regimes. In some naive way the proposers of the bill think that by tweaking the sentencing, we are going to get a safer country. I do not understand this.
I have had a close-up look at the Canadian justice system. I have been privileged to be in the House for many years. I was on the justice committee for 15 years. I had the privilege of seeing the criminal justice system up close, and it was not always pretty. I saw it working reasonably well. It is not like there were never any mistakes.
I cannot accept that by throwing a mandatory minimum sentence into a particular offence, we are suddenly going to have a reduction in the number of offences. The criminals out there, the would-be criminals, the maybe criminals do not know what the sentence is for any particular crime. In fact, I challenge anybody here today, any member of the House, to get up and tell us what the sentence would be for a particular offence, even under this bill. One could not know. The reason is we have provided for sentencing ranges. When people are convicted, they do not know what the sentence will be until the judge finally decides.
If we do not know what the sentence is, how could those would-be criminals out on the streets know what the sentencing would be? In their mind, as I have always seen it, it is binary in reaction to the criminal justice system. Either they are going to get their deterrences, or they are going to get caught or they are not. It is not about what the sentence is. They do not get out their little calculators and calculate what the sentence is before they hop into the car. Their whole view of this is whether they are going to caught. If they think they are going to get caught, they are not going to do it that night. If they think they are not going to get caught, they might.
I do not understand the mentality that urges upon the House that if we suddenly put in a whole bunch of mandatory minimum sentences, all those bad guys will know what the sentence is and they will stop their criminal activity and we will be safer. I just had to get in that sentencing issue.
I am pleased to have had a chance to talk about the bill. It looks like we are going to have ourselves an identity theft bill.