Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't believe I will need five minutes. Not surprisingly, our office has no views on the whole issue of fees for automatic teller machines or anything like it.

Finance committee  Exactly. We are, however, greatly concerned about the rising incidence of electronic data theft, which leads increasingly to credit card, debit card, and bank account transfer fraud. The numbers are going up on incidents of that nature. Consumers are increasingly unable to recou

Information & Ethics committee  There are a lot of small ISPs, yes, but the majority of Internet services are provided by essentially a handful of companies in this country, a huge proportion.

Information & Ethics committee  That would have cost implications as well.

Information & Ethics committee  It would be a cumbersome thing to have to go through. It's also unclear to me how we would get ourselves into Federal Court to do this, since Federal Court is not a court of inherent jurisdiction. Without some sort of statutory amendment, I'm not sure that we could even get ourse

Information & Ethics committee  In my previous life I was with the Department of Justice and was implicated, if you will, in the drafting of this bill. I've heard all of the arguments from all of the stakeholders and I've heard from the RCMP, and you should know that the industry committee amended the original

Information & Ethics committee  I have not heard anything from anybody suggesting that ISPs are reluctant to disclose information in these kinds of circumstances.

Information & Ethics committee  On the ISPs in question, there's a handful of them, when you get right down to it, that provide these services across the country. They are large corporations; they are reputable corporate citizens. It seems to me that it's a bit of a slippery slope on the privacy side if you st

Information & Ethics committee  Right.

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of the law you're reviewing right now, we have a mandate to deal with spam. I thank our lucky stars that most of the population hasn't figured that one out, because we could be drowning in spam—not spam, but in complaints. We have had a couple of spam-related complaints.

Information & Ethics committee  The final phase, yes.

Information & Ethics committee  British Columbia is the only province that has in fact carved work product out of personal information. I don't know why they made that decision, but they did. Our position is fundamentally that, as guardians of the privacy of Canadians, anything that has a possibility of deroga

Information & Ethics committee  I've spoken to him about it informally. It doesn't appear to have been a problem. I don't know how often he's had to rely on it. I can get more information for you if you would like.

Information & Ethics committee  I did. When Parliament enacted PIPEDA, they anticipated the possibility that we could wind up with a patchwork, and that's why the provision for “substantially similar” is in there. It's an attempt to guide provinces towards some sort of harmonization. Although when you look at

Information & Ethics committee  You've heard a lot about work product. Our experience indicates that in many cases work product is not essentially personal information. There are some circumstances where something that appears on the face of it to be work product could be personal information, in that it reveal