Justice committee  In developing the list of documents in proposed section 56.1, we got together a fairly large group of people from a variety of different federal departments to try to identify which documents were primarily used for identification purposes. As has already been noted, the Senate l

Justice committee  There are many challenges from a legislative perspective in dealing with identity theft. One of the biggest ones is that, as you mentioned, people already have a preconceived notion of what identity theft means. The various industries that have been involved in the process of dev

Justice committee  I think the starting point in answering that question is to distinguish two separate offences. In proposed section 56.1, that's the offence in relation to government-issued identity documents. Identity theft doesn't require reliance on a document. That offence can involve mere po

Justice committee  That's a very sophisticated question that I'll do my best to answer. I think the federal and provincial privacy commissioners across the country, as well as privacy advocates, look at identity theft from an invasion-of-privacy perspective. But that's not really the criminal law

Justice committee  That presents a real problem in dealing with identity theft legislation, but it is one that we were very aware of as we were developing the legislation. The offence of personation, which this bill will rename as identity fraud, only applies to a person who pretends to be a real

Justice committee  Well, to begin with, these issues didn't actually arise early on in our consultations and discussions about where we should go for identity theft. More importantly, they did arise at a later date after we were well on our way with the package of amendments you see in front of you

Justice committee  I would be quite confident in saying that all 50 states have identity theft legislation. They're remarkably different from each other in a number of ways. You might see up to a dozen different patterns that are repeated throughout the 50 states, so it's not “one size fits all”. T

Justice committee  The last time I looked—and unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to bring myself up to date immediately in advance of this meeting, but I would have done so prior to going to the Senate committee—there are a small number of states in Australia that have legislation that's v

Justice committee  One of the concerns that we heard a number of times when we were consulting with police and prosecution authorities was they were concerned about cases where the documents were forgeries. For instance, if I have a forged birth certificate in someone else's name, or 17 forged birt

Justice committee  There's actually a simple answer to that question, but your question nonetheless raises some larger issues. The answer to that question, which is relatively simple, but not necessarily in 100% of the cases, is that the credit card offences that are already in the Criminal Code eq

Justice committee  At present I don't think the Department of Justice has information packages. The Department of Justice really only has authority to look at this issue from the perspective of how we can amend the criminal laws in this area. If that were to take place at some point in the future,

Justice committee  That's a very interesting question. Two weeks ago, we were here as you discussed Bill C-299, and I think this committee identified pretexting as one of a number of ways in which information could be obtained for later use in identity theft and identity fraud. That's the scope of

Justice committee  Well, it wouldn't be covered by this section, but that would actually not be a disadvantage. Stealing someone's identity card is the offence of theft. That can be proved without having to prove the intent to use it to commit fraud or personation, which these motions would add to

Justice committee  What I was going to add was that I think the existing personation offence would cover the full range of that person's behaviour: they took the identity of a person who was deceased, so that falls within the ambit of personation, and they pretended to be that person by using their

Justice committee  It's a very interesting question, which ties in nicely with the question Mr. Murphy asked in relation to the use of the term “information” in the Criminal Code. The Criminal Code's dealings with information are a fairly new development in the criminal law, and one of the reasons