Justice committee  I am not aware of any recently where they were the principal suspect in a fraud over $1 million and got less than two years. I'll refer to my colleagues to see if they're aware of any recently. Steve.

Justice committee  I can't speak to the methodology. Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of studies that deal specifically with trying to measure the magnitude of fraud. Without actually knowing and looking at what their methodology is, no, I wouldn't be able to comment on that.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Yes. In my understanding, they are all either general accountants or chartered accountants, but they are accountants.

Justice committee  Most of the forensic accountants are permanent staff, embedded within the actual teams. There's definitely one full-time forensic accountant in each of the IMETs in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto. On an as-needed basis if we require additional forensic accountants, we will go out and obtain that service.

Justice committee  No, most of them are contracted through the forensic accounting group at Public Works and Government Services Canada.

Justice committee  I can't speak in terms of prosecuting; I can only speak from an investigative standpoint. Obviously, public prosecution or provincial prosecutors would have to speak from a prosecution viewpoint, but the bill is a sentencing bill, as it is, from my understanding, so it would not impact the investigation.

Justice committee  I would have to say yes. This current legislation is not adding any new offences and the primary offence we always work with, whether it be in the area of capital markets or any type of other fraud, is the fraud provision within the Criminal Code of Canada, which covers a very broad spectrum of fraudulent activity, obviously.

Justice committee  We would definitely hope we have sufficient evidence of any individuals being involved in fraudulent activity. Again, it's difficult to articulate without having a specific case in front of us. In every investigation we try as much as possible to identify the broadest scope of individuals involved in a fraudulent activity and, as much as possible, develop evidence to eventually charge and prosecute as many of those individuals as possible.

Justice committee  Yes. I think to have those types of offences included would be consistent, in line with it being, if it's over $1 million, a type of major fraudulent activity.

Justice committee  On the big components that were recommended by Mr. Le Pan in his report, a lot of them had to do with adding new resources to help us expedite some of our investigations. As I mentioned earlier, these investigations are long and very paper-intensive. A number of the recommendations dealt with adding additional resources for things like transcribing documents and for overall major case management for these big cases.

Justice committee  Yes. There was additional funding provided at the time for the implementation of these recommendations.

Justice committee  It was an additional $10 million.

Justice committee  My understanding is that it will be ongoing funding. Yes.

Justice committee  In summary, it's a bill that we support. We see no major concerns with the legislation. I believe mandatory sentencing has the potential to be a useful deterrent against any criminal activity. Potential criminals will know with certainty that there will be a consistent minimum consequence for carrying out fraudulent activity that exceeds $1 million.