Last year I wrote about the Tort for Negligent Investigations and how this would reach out and touch a Private Investigation firm in Canada soon.
Private Investigator Sued
The Ontario Court of Appeal has expanded the tort of negligent investigation to allow employees to sue private investigators hired by employers to probe suspected wrongdoing in the workplace. The unanimous ruling by Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor and Justices Marc Rosenberg and Kathryn Feldman extends the newly created tort of negligent investigation to private investigators. This tort was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 2007 as applicable to police.
In Correia v. Canac Kitchens, 2008 ONCA 506 & [2008] O.J. No. 2497, the court has imposed a new duty of care regarding investigators. The plaintiff was an innocent employee mistakenly fired and arrested for theft following a private investigation launched by his employer. His name was confused with that of another employee with a similar name. The sequence of events that led to erroneous identification of Mr. Correia is summarized in the chronology in paragraph [8].
Every Private Investigator in Canada should pay close attention to this case and the circumstances that gave rise to it.
Franchises identify themselves in the marketplace by using a common name and trademark. Each user of the name purchases a franchise which allows the franchisee the right to use the name. This is where the fun begins.
The franchisee will be a company or partnership with rights to use the name. In Canada, the right to use the name will normally be filed as a Business Name Registration. This allows a person, company, or partnership to operate under a name other than his or its proper name.
Now imagine you have a franchise at 123 Main Street in some Ontario town or city. How do you distinguish it from all the other franchises using the same business name?
In Ontario, OnCorp will allow you to view a list of all the business name registrations along with the recorded addresses.
A mouse click in the check-box next to the registration with the correct address will get you the Business Name Registration, and that will tell you the name of the company or partnership that owns that franchise location.
You don’t have to spend $100 to $200 a year to defend yourself from identity theft at the level of protection that a paid service offers. You can do almost everything the services do, for free.
DIY Identity-theft Protection: A 12-step Program
The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a self-regulatory body, replaces both the 90 year old Investment Dealers Association and Market Regulations Services Inc. as the single overseer of the integrity of debt and equity trading in Canada.
The Investment Dealers Association the IDA had regulated member firms in the brokerage business as well as fixed-income trading and Market Regulations Services Inc. conducted market surveillance.
A web document entitled lists the Canadian federal government databases accessible through the Internet in 2008.
The Government of Canada Publications Web site allows you to locate and/or order free and priced publications authored by Government of Canada departments. These publications encompass both traditional printed documents and publications in alternative formats and electronic products. The catalog contains over 100,000 titles.
The Inter-Corporate Ownership data produced by Statistics Canada contains information on the structures of Canadian enterprises. It provides the names of all holding and held companies (both domestic and foreign) in Canada and their respective ownership percentages.
The information is collected by Statistics Canada under the Corporations and Labour Unions Returns Act (CALURA) and is supplemented with information from international publications. In 1998 the act was amended to remove the labour unions component (Part II), leaving Part I of the Act unchanged. The revised Act, named the Corporations Returns Act, is equivalent to CALURA part I.
All the reporting companies must have gross revenues of at least 15 million dollars or assets exceeding 10 million dollars.
The updated data is reported quarterly. This data is the most accurate, timely, and complete data on inter-corporate ownership in Canada. It also provides detailed information of multi-national enterprises that have some component in Canada.
Corporate Affiliations
The Corporate Affiliations database appears on LexisNexis and Dialog. It can also be purchased as directories and on CD. According to the Dialog Bluesheet, it covers about 184,000 U.S. and non-U.S. companies. This includes private and public companies, both parents and their subsidiaries and major divisions. All major U.S. domestic and international stock exchange listed companies are included. U.S. privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $10 million and foreign privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $50 million to be included in the database. Each record includes the executive names, director names, corporate family hierarchy. Net worth, total assets, and total liabilities sometimes appear in the record.
I have never found this resource particularly useful because it has a high threshold for inclusion of companies. It is also US-centric. It shines for researching large enterprises with a large component in the U.S.A..
Finding how your subject company fits into a large enterprise structure may turn into an avocation with some companies, but I’ll tell you how to get started.
Begin by understanding the terminology, then in the case of Canada, realize that you will have difficulty recognising interlocking boards as you may not search corporate filings by director name. This leaves you with the immediate subject company as your starting point.
Typically, I start with Dun & Bradstreet Canadian Market Identifiers (DMI). The advantages of the DMI databases (there are several DMI databases) are the number of companies in the database (over 1.2 million), and no sales or asset threshold for inclusion in the database.
The most useful fields in this database are the Dun’s Numbers for the company and its Parent and Ultimate Domestic Parent. This identifies three levels of the overall enterprise to explore in one record. You will have the information on the subject company, and further searches will identify its immediate parent and the ultimate domestic parent.
I then search the D&B Who Owns Whom database for the Ultimate Domestic Parent to identify the foreign parent if one exists. If I find an Ultimate Global Parent, then I determine what my record cost will be by listing the companies in the family tree. Usually, I end up paying the lowest amount as there will be 25 or fewer companies in the family tree. I have never had to pay the full record cost because I have never come across an enterprise family with over 200 member companies.
In Canada, only one incorporating jurisdiction allows a search by officer or director name. Uncovering a person’s corporate affiliations in Canada is difficult.
The Investigator must embark upon an involved search strategy using a variety of database aggregators, the Internet, and a few public record sources. After conducting all these searches, the Investigator will never be certain that he has found everything.
Doing this type of research is dependent upon the Investigator’s understanding of the sources’ content and how to connect the data to the objectives of the investigation.
The Investigator must know how to search directory databases, commercial credit reports, news and journal databases, insider filings, statistical data, court records, lien filings, and much more to reveal corporate affiliations in Canada.
This news story about the apprehension of a man who had child porn on his laptop illustrates how the data on your laptop could be compromised during a border crossing. The actions of this border guard appear to benefit society in this instance.
Texas man arrested at Ottawa airport for child porn faces up to 30 years
The Ottawa Citizen, Published: Sunday, March 23, 2008
The officer asked if he had anything prohibited on his computer and Mr. Moore said he didn’t, but that his brother also used the laptop. When the computer underwent secondary screening, the child pornography files were discovered, and Canadian officials arrested Mr. Moore. He was later transferred to Texas.
When I was traveling and crossing borders frequently, only once did a border guard look at the papers I was carrying. Today, the same border guard is much more likely to probe my laptop.
For the business traveller, this poses significant risk, as the person examining his mobile computer and other electronic devices will either be incompetent or very knowledgeable. The border officials may also have motives for the search that are unrelated to their primary purpose. Each circumstance creates its own risk for the traveller.
I previously wrote about Bill C-27 and how it will make it an offence in Canada to recklessly make available or sell personal information knowing it will be used to commit fraud.
Google, and others, offer tools such as on-line word processing but your data is housed by that entity, usually in the USA, and is thus subject to the US Patriot Act, and other laws that allow government surveillance of your data.
In my view, using these Web-based collaborative tools amounts to Reckless Personal Information Handling.
Web-based Collaborative Tools
The Globe and Mail recently published an interesting article about this:
Patriot Act haunts Google service
by SIMON AVERY, Globe and Mail March 24, 2008
Some other organizations are banning Google’s innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.
The Ontario Divisional Court, ruled in Petti v. George Coppel Jewellers Ltd. that polygraph test results are inadmissible as evidence in Ontario civil court proceedings:
Justice Quinn reviewed the law. He said that evidence that a person has offered to submit to polygraph testing can be admissible, but that was a neutral factor here, since both parties had made such an offer. Secondly, the questions and answers from the testing can be admissible, if they constitute admissions against interest. But the test results themselves are not admissible because they usurp the jurisdiction of the trier of fact. As His Honour said, “the court should not delegate its jurisdiction, even on consent”. Hence, a new trial was ordered.
Polygraphy was disallowed in criminal proceedings in a 1987 ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada.
John J. Furedy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, maintains a site opposed to the polygraph that has links to research articles on the efficacy of polygraph tests.
When I travel for work, I undertake what some people consider extreme measures to protect proprietary client data from theft by officials at international borders. These officials do not need warrants to seize or examine anything in your possession when crossing a border and that makes border officials excellent spies. This issue arose recently regarding the actions of the US border officials:
In Canada, one law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with “blank laptops” whose hard drives contain no data. “We just access our information through the Internet,” said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but “those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,” he said.
Creating a “blank laptop” entails more than just hitting the delete key or even using a utility to overwrite existing data. The hacking risk is also greater than most people realize, especially with wireless connections. Even with secure end-to-end encryption, traffic analysis can yield very useful intelligence.
According to a news article in the Summit Daily News, a private investigator from Glenwood Springs, CO, was arrested Thursday after placing a tracking device on a car. The tracking device was for a divorce case the investigator was working. A witness saw the investigator crawl under an SUV and then drive away. The witness called the police who found the device attached under the SUV. The police treated the unknown device as a bomb, evacuating the area and calling in the bomb squad. Read the whole story Click Here See also Denver TV News
In Canada the use of a vehicle tracker requires a warrant pursuant to CCC S. 492.1.
Google has begun the indexation of Facebook pages.
The best approach to find Facebook content via Google is not to simply plug in name or keyword(s)…Try adding the keyword, “Facebook” to your initial query.
What the Investigator Must Know About Facebook
In the closed community of Facebook, Google asked permission to index the pages. If you are an Investigator, and your subject is represented, then asking permission to see his or her page is contact with a represented litigant. In Canada, if the opposing litigant is represented by council, then you may not contact him or her in person, by telephone, or electronically. In most cases you have to ask to be listed as a friend to view the subject’s Facebook page. Doing this will be considered improperly making contact with the litigant and whatever you find will be deemed inadmissible.
However, what you find in Google, other search engines, and unrelated Facebook pages may be used as the basis for a motion for the production of the subject’s entire Facebook page as happened in KOURTESIS V. JORIS (2007).
