It is now easier for the divorced, widowed, and those who have annulled to revert to their former surnames. The process is simpler and only costs $25. Previously, the application was required within only 90 days or it was a more expensive and lengthy process. The new law eliminates the 90 day time limit.
This will impact skip tracers as this change becomes more widely known. While it is now harder for debtors to use an Ontario name change to elude creditors, it still happens.
Sales of large quantities of stock or the sale of assets and equipment of the business itself outside the regular course of business are considered a sale “in bulk”. The Bulk Sales Act is designed to protect the creditors of a business owner by requiring the owner to follow the procedures of the Act for sales outside the regular course of business.
If a buyer wishes to purchase the assets and equipment of a business, the seller “in bulk” must provide an affidavit stating that all creditors have been paid, or they will be paid from the proceeds of the sale. In some cases the buyer pays an assigned trustee and creditors of the business may wish to waive their rights in which case the proceeds are paid.
A ‘Bulk Sales search‘ determines if a bulk sales affidavit has been filed with the relevant Ontario Superior Court of Justice office.
If you are interested in an Ontario business’s assets, debts, cash flow, and general financial condition, then a a Bulk Sale Act search is an important search. It may tell you if the business is failing or if it has suffered a set-back. You may learn of an abandoned line or the sale of a production facility. You may learn of a legal action in another jurisdiction by contacting or researching the other parties to the bulk sale. Any sale that indicates that creditors will be paid from the proceeds of the sale may indicate a judgment that is being satisfied or it may be part of the settlement of a claim.
The Bank Act (1991, c. 46) is an Act of the Government of Canada respecting banks and banking. The Canadian banking industry includes 20 domestic banks, 24 foreign bank subsidiaries and 22 foreign bank branches operating in Canada.
Canadian Banks have the right to lend money to wholesalers, retailers, shippers and dealers in “products of agriculture, products of aquaculture, products of the forest, products of the quarry and mine, products of the sea, lakes, and rivers, of goods, wares and merchandise, manufactured or otherwise” on the security of such goods or products, and to lend money to manufacturers on their goods and inventories.
When doing a background investigation of a person, the PI will be looking for previously unknown assets, banking and financial arrangements, or corporate affiliations. When investigating a company, the PI will be looking for previously unknown assets, banking, and financial arrangements. In both cases, the equity held by the subject in the assets will be of interest. Searching the Bank Act Security Registry may reveal all of the above.
Under S. 427 of the Bank Act, the borrower must sign a document that provides the bank with the first preferential lien on the goods or equipment. The Bank then registers a ‘Notice of Intention‘ to take the goods as security, to perfect its security interest.
The Bank of Canada offers a Security Registry service which may be searched for registrations. The search will reveal whether the Bank of Canada has taken security on property that may interest you. If the Bank does have a claim on the property, then it means that it has loaned the customer money and that it has the right to take possession of and sell the property if the loan is not paid. This is important for you to know for two reasons. First, it shows that the person or business is indebted to a Canadian chartered bank and may have equity in the property listed in the security agreement. Second, it may uncover previously unknown assets, banking and financial arrangements, or corporate affiliations. You will need to provide the name of the person or business being searched.
Years ago, we only did this when we suspected the subject person or company might have an interest in an agricultural business. Today however, we find more non-agricultural businesses in the Bank of Canada registry. We have online access to the Bank of Canada registry to search for Bank Act Security items. The search results often indicate that a business assigned its inventory to a bank as security under the Bank Act.
A manual search for Notices of Intention filed under Section 427 of the Bank Act are conducted at the agency of the Bank of Canada in the province or territory where the debtor’s place of business is located. For Bank Act searches, “agency” means, in a province, the office of the Bank of Canada or its authorized representative but does not include its Ottawa office, and in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut means the office of the clerk of the court of each of those territories respectively [see S. 427(5)].
As an Investigator, I often have to search for references to a certain telephone number. A few years ago, these searches started to involve looking for a possible prostitution involvement. This is a search for which I frequently get requests.
Doing this isn’t rocket science, so here is my current list of sites. Of course, I have devised a way of automating the search process and I’m not going to tell you how I do that. Just remember, you must document your search method and the results properly if this is could end-up as evidence.
Google Ad-sense sent an automated notice that their machines were going to stop serving ads because I listed the sites that we often search for telephone numbers as explained above. Of course machines can’t read, but they can find links. Now Google is censoring content because they don’t like to place ads on anything that has links to sites that they don’t like, in this case so-called ‘adult content’. I can understand not wanting to be involved in promoting pornography or the sex trade, but this is only a machine telling me what to write and there is nobody to talk to and no living person at Google ever read this article.
Some companies claim to be able to perform real-time “ping” geo-location tracking of almost any cell phone. After paying, the Investigator is told that the cell phone is being pinged but has not answered and the Investigator is out hundreds of dollars. This is not how Location Based Services work in a mobile phone network.
Some companies, usually in the U.S.A., claim that they can do CPIC searches. The normal answer is that nothing was found. Of course no search of any kind was performed. They also charge for searches by province when CPIC covers all of Canada. Sometimes, the single-province searches are advertised as CPIC but actually search the provincial court case management system.
Internet News reports Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Coming Into Force, Osler, July 5, 2011
Canadian government has passed legislation to address spam (though it is still awaiting proclamation).
“Known as Canada’s Anti-Spam Law, or CASL1, the new rules go much further than restricting bulk, unsolicited e-mail messages, by creating an express consent regime that applies to almost all e-mails and other electronic messages sent for a commercial purpose. And unlike the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, which applies only to e-mail, CASL’s anti-spam provisions also apply to other forms of electronic communication, such as text messages, instant messaging and social media messaging.”
I have written about using CarFax and CarProof before.
CarFax is owned by CarMax, while AutoCheck is owned by the large U.S.credit reporting agency, Experian. AutoCheck is not to confused with Auto Check™ which is an online database containing information about accident damaged, insurance “total loss” branded and stolen vehicles that was developed in 1995 by the Used Car Dealers Association of Ontario, for the exclusive use of its members.
AutoCheck purchases the data from the auto auctions and CarFax does not. As a result of this, CarFax often fails to report previous accidents and things like frame damage. Autocheck is the de facto standard at the auto auctions.
In Canada Carproof is by far the better system, as they have more access to insurance data, repair shop estimates, lien history, police and ministry of Transportation data, and more.
An Investigator armed with a vehicle’s VIN, and who is willing to pay the fees, just might find out about an undisclosed vehicle accident using one of these services.
Environmental law violators in British Columbia are now in a searchable online database. “The free database includes a wide variety of compliance and enforcement actions taken by ministry staff and enforcement officers. It includes orders, administrative sanctions, tickets and court convictions covering hunting and fishing, open burning, mud bogging, dam safety, and pesticide and pollution violations.”
The provinces have been granted power over “property and civil rights in the province” in Section 92(13) of The Constitution Act, 1867.
This division of power forced the Trudeau government to remove the right to private property from the Charter of Rights when the provinces protested its inclusion. The provinces saw this as limiting their ability to tax, expropriate, and exercise control over property ownership. Neither the federal nor provincial governments are under any constitutional obligation to pay fair (or any) compensation for expropriated property. The Constitution Act 1867 and the Charter of Rights do not address this issue. Legislatures are also free to legislate away your ability to use any property for any purpose. Ontario and Quebec will probably try this route to control firearms ownership once the Long Arm Registry is eliminated by the federal government.
This is starting to backfire. Landowner associations and grass-roots movements are starting to form in Ontario and Alberta. These groups and movements to include property rights into the Charter of Rights will become a prominent feature of the political landscape in years to come.
The most recent Auditor-General report reveals some problems at the RCMP that I have suspected for years. Auditor-General reports going back to 2000 have criticized the CPIC system (see 7.86) regarding timely delivery of criminal record data.
The problem we encounter most often is the backlog of criminal records that has seen the updating of some records taking 3 years.
The Auditor-General estimates that the RCMP takes an average of 14 months to update an English criminal record in CPIC. The French updates take an average of 36 months. The stated goal is updating a record in 24 hours. Unfortunately, reality is an average time of 334 working days (see 5.60).
At some point this is going to result in tragedy. Even more unfortunate, is the fact that the RCMP and the government is judgment-proof for this negligent behaviour. The investigation company used by employers and their insurance companies aren’t as lucky. Even if a claim is rejected by the courts, the legal expenses may destroy the company for reporting in good faith what was on CPIC.
How will this play out when a sex offender is hired to work with vulnerable people. What will happen when that same offender follows his natural instincts and victimizes someone.
It is also conceivable that this situation will also thicken our border with the U.S.A. as their authorities start to act upon their distrust of CPIC. Frequent border-crossers, such as truck drivers, will be subjected to additional delays. If that extends to airports we can expect more security searches, questioning, and delays.
The problems we see with CPIC should be a warning about all supposedly trusted and sole source systems. All such systems break-down!
When we are forced to trust one system, especially a critical system, and that system fails, we are all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter it is health care or CPIC, without reliable alternatives, people will be hurt.
Named for Mareva Compania Naviera SA v International Bulkcarriers SA [1975] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 509, a Mareva Injunction is a court order which freezes assets so that a defendant cannot surreptitiously dissipate assets to prevent the enforcement of a judgment.
These injunctions are widely recognised in common law jurisdictions and such orders can have world-wide effect. Similar provisions are now available in the rest of Europe, under Article 9(2) of the European Union Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, which was approved in April 2004.
The injunction is often granted ex parte and pre-trial based on affidavit evidence alone. A Norwich order sometimes precedes the Mareva Injunction. A Mareva Injunction is often combined with an Anton Piller order. The combination of a Mareva Injunction and an Anton Pillar order can be devastating to a business or professional person by freezing assets and revealing proprietary processes and data to competitors. However, this does prevent a foreign company from removing its assets from the country before a trial can take place. Today’s telecommunications makes moving assets almost instantaneous. The Anton Pillar order prevents the destruction of evidence before trial.
I think R V. Cole, 2011 ONCA 218 will become the leading case on an employee’s expectation of privacy on a work-provided computer. This appeal was a partial victory to a Sudbury high school teacher charged with possession of child pornography. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that police violated his Charter rights when they searched his laptop without a warrant.
A search of Cole’s computer by the high school’s IT staff found sexually explicit photos of a Grade 10 student that he acquired from the student’s email account. The laptop was then turned over to the police and searched without a warrant. The proceeds of the police search were excluded while the IT technician’s search was proper as it was for the purposes of maintaining the school board’s network and the laptop.
Justice Karakatsanis wrote for the Ontario Court of Appeal which found the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his laptop based on the following factors:
This seems consistent with the prevailing case law regarding the recognition of an employer’s right to govern the use of their systems through policy, but it also recognises the rising privacy expectations of employees in the personal use of an employer’s system.
There is some confusion going around about Bill C-23. It was split into two parts, and because the second part, C-23B, has been the most debated, people associate C-23A, which received Royal Assent on 29 Jun 2010, with the changes proposed by C-23B, which has not yet been made law.
Bill C-23A only covers certain aspects of the full bill, while C-23B covers the bulk of the changes. Part A, which has been made law, covers the following:
1. Lengthens pardon waiting periods from 3 years to 5 years and from 5 years to 10 years for certain crimes.
2. Puts the onus on the applicant for proving that a pardon would bring them measurable benefit.
3. Gives the Parole Board of Canada more discretion for granting pardon applications.
Bill C-23B will bring a few more changes, but for now, these are the basic changes that have already taken place. C-23B is scheduled for its third reading on March 24th and will undergo clause by clause consideration in April. For more information on these changes, please visit: http://www.canadianpardons.ca/. The Pardon & Waiver Wiki and Blog pages should be very useful if you need to understand the Pardon and Waiver process in Canada.
In Florida, a Judge ordered a debt collection agency not to use social media in attempting to locate woman or her family. In Canada, you may specify to the collection agency when and where it can call you. A collection agency is not permitted to contact you at times and in places where you’ve asked it not to, such as a place of work or presumably through Facebook for example. If you have asked the agency not to contact you at a certain location or time and the agency contacts you at that location or time, then the agency may be subject to prosecution. It is likely that this extends to using Facebook, though I have not seen any similar cases like the one in Florida here in Canada.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) recently added a new requirement to its policy related to criminal record checks. This requirement applies to all agencies across Canada that access the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) to perform a criminal record check. CPIC is administered by RCMP. All agencies that access CPIC, including the Private Security and Investigative Services Branch (Branch) are required to comply with the RCMP CPIC Policy.
Effective March 21, 2011, all applicants for licences must have a guarantor confirm their identity by verifying the identification documentation (ID) that accompanies their application. Applications cannot be processed without this confirmation by a guarantor. This requirement applies to both individual licensees as well as agency personnel that are named in the application for an agency license. Typically these are officers, directors or partners of the company who, as part of the agency application process, are also required to have a criminal record check.