Justice committee  I will start. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting the RCMP to participate in today's proceedings. I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak about the RCMP's efforts to address financial crime in Canada. White-collar crime is local as well as global, and it comes in many different forms.

Justice committee  It will assist us in that we will have a tool if we do identify someone using another person's identification to attempt to advance a title fraud. There will be a provision in here, “possession of that identification”, that we can use at the outset, hopefully before the actual title fraud has been carried out.

Justice committee  Yes, I do believe it would already be covered under the Criminal Code as uttering a forged document. So whether it be a health card or any other piece of identification or card that will get you an advantage, whether it be health care or some other advantage, it would be covered under uttering a forged document.

Justice committee  I guess in terms of the proceeds that would be generated from that fraud, there are provisions under proceeds of crime to attempt to seize and eventually forfeit those gains as proceeds of a criminal activity. They can be forfeited, obviously, to the crown. I'm not able to speak to what discretion a judge would have in terms of applying that in terms of restitution to victims.

Justice committee  It's very similar to other types of criminal activity. In terms of working with the international community and facilitating criminal investigations, our most successful and used tool is the mutual legal assistance act. That's actually where we would request assistance from a foreign law enforcement agency.

Justice committee  Yes. To my knowledge, it is the credit card companies or the banking institutions that cover the loss for credit card or debit card fraud.

Justice committee  Yes, that is the protection we are looking for. Again, our position is that we would prefer to have the exemption in this section rather than in section 25.1, for the same reasons as I mentioned earlier. The use of identification by undercover police officers is a tool they use on a daily ongoing basis; it's not a one-time tool such as pursuing a one-time criminal activity, for which we would seek justification under section 25.1.

Justice committee  Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with it to present a position on how it interacts with Bill S-4 at this point.

Justice committee  I don't know if we'll ever be able to deter everyone from becoming involved in these types of criminal activities. In terms of deterrents, what we see in this bill as the big benefit is having offences that will at least enable us to have a greater impact in terms of those individuals who are acquiring, possessing, and trafficking personal identification information for the purpose of eventual additional fraudulent activity.

Justice committee  The use of identification?

Justice committee  Because it is not being used to facilitate a criminal activity; it's being used for the purpose of law enforcement investigations, the use of identification by an undercover police officer.

Justice committee  There's nothing that prevents us from using it as a piece of identification, as a tool for law enforcement to pursue criminal investigation.

Justice committee  I'm not sure we've actually done any analysis and I don't think I'm in a position to say exactly how many times it gets used. I think what I can say is that it would be used on an extremely regular basis. I think the use of identification by undercover officers is actually the foundation of having an undercover program--being able to use on a daily basis covert identification.

Justice committee  Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to give you a specific figure in terms of the number of experts we have in informatics and technological-crime-type issues. What I can say is that we have a well-established technological crime unit within the RCMP. We have a very significant informatics component to our national organization.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. Obviously the broader spectrum of white collar crime would bring into play a lot greater tools than the issue before us today with regards to identify theft, identify fraud. I think one of the big issues, and Mr. MacRury mentioned it, is how we can take a more comprehensive collective approach, specifically with regards to issues like identify theft and identify fraud, but even broader, expanding that out to issues like mass marketing fraud, which is still a huge problem here in Canada today and internationally.