People arrive at this question from two directions. Some have been told they need an investigator and want to know whether that is true before they spend the money. Others have already decided to handle something in house — an internal complaint, a missing customer, a claim that does not add up — and want to know whether they are allowed to.

Both questions have the same answer, and it is not the one most people expect. Whether licensed work is involved does not depend on who you are, what your business card says, or what you call the engagement on an invoice. It depends on what is being done, and whether someone is being paid to do it.

This article helps you work out which side of that line your matter sits on. It does not decide it for you, and the last section explains why.

Start with the statute's own definition

British Columbia's Security Services Act defines security work at s.1 as a closed list of seven services — an armoured car guard service, a locksmith, a private investigator, a security alarm service, a security consultant, a security guard service, and a body armour salesperson. If what you need is not one of those seven, this Act is not your problem. That is why, for instance, handing someone a court document is not licensed work in BC — a point we set out in full in our article on process servers.

The item that catches people is the third one, and the definition of it is worth reading rather than paraphrasing:

"private investigator" means a person who, for consideration, seeks or obtains information about any of the following: (a) crimes, offences, contraventions or misconduct; (b) the activities, character or repute of a person or organization; (c) the whereabouts of a person; (d) the location, disposition or recovery of lost, stolen or missing property; (e) the cause of or the responsibility for any fire, accident or incident

Read what that sentence is built around. It is not built around a title, a qualification, an association membership or a business category. It is built around an activity — seeking or obtaining information — applied to five subject matters, done for consideration.

So the useful question is never "am I a private investigator?" It is "is somebody being paid to find out one of those five things?"

The three questions, in order

One: is the subject matter on the list? Misconduct. A person's activities, character or repute. Someone's whereabouts. Lost, stolen or missing property. The cause of or responsibility for a fire, accident or incident. That list is broad by design and it covers most of what businesses actually want to know when something has gone wrong.

Two: is it for consideration? The definition contains those three words, and they are doing real work. Information gathering that nobody is being paid for sits differently from information gathering that somebody is being paid for. What that means at the edges — an employee whose salary covers an internal review, a contractor paid a flat fee for a bundle of tasks of which this is one — is exactly the sort of question a single sentence in an article should not be pretending to settle.

Three: does an exemption apply? The Act itself contemplates this. Section 11 provides that a person must not carry on a security business unless the person holds a valid business licence "or is exempt by regulation" — so the exemptions are made in the regulation, not in the Act, and they are not a general fairness principle a reader can reason their way into. We say more about that below, including what we are not going to tell you.

Work that genuinely belongs to someone else

Some matters are not exempt investigative work. They are simply a different profession's work, done under a different regulator, and the Security Services Act is not the statute that governs them.

Your lawyer's own file work. Legal research, document review, examining a witness, retaining an expert, obtaining records through the court's own processes — that is the practice of law, regulated as such. If your dispute is genuinely about documents and legal analysis rather than about finding facts in the field, you may need counsel and not an investigator at all. It is worth asking your lawyer that question directly before you hire anyone.

A forensic accountant's review. Tracing funds through books and records, reconstructing accounts, and giving an opinion on what the numbers show is accountancy, and it is performed under an accounting regulator's rules. Where a file needs both — the money traced and the person located — that is two engagements, not one.

An employer's own internal process. Most workplace complaints are handled by the employer, through its own managers or human resources function, under its own policies and any applicable collective agreement. That is ordinary employment administration.

But notice what changes when an employer pays an outside firm to gather the facts. At that point somebody is being paid to seek information about misconduct, or about a person's activities, and the definition above is not written in a way that cares whether the client is an employer.

There is a second layer that applies to internal processes regardless of licensing, and it is the one employers more often get wrong: BC's Personal Information Protection Act governs employee personal information at collection (s.13), use (s.16) and disclosure (s.19), each carrying a duty to notify the individual about what is being handled and why. Doing an investigation in house does not exempt it from privacy law. It only removes one of the two sets of rules.

Where people assume an exemption that is not there

"We are just confirming an address." This is the single most common one, and it is the whereabouts limb, in plain sight. Calling it a locate service, a trace, an address confirmation or a skip search does not move it. The statutory test is the activity.

"It is only open-source research." The definition says nothing about the method. Whether the information comes from a registry, a search engine or a doorstep conversation is a question about how the work is done, not about whether it is the work.

"We are not charging for that part." Where a broader paid engagement includes it, the consideration question is not as clean as the sentence implies. It is worth taking advice rather than assuming.

"The firm we hired says it does not need a licence." A firm's own assessment of its licensing position is not a finding. Ask for the business licence number and check it. A licensed business holds one security business licence, and the registrar may impose conditions confining it to specified activities or addresses (s.16(3)) — so a firm should be able to give you one number without going to look for it.

"They are out of province." The work is being done here, about a person here, for a client here. Where the firm's letterhead is registered is not the question the Act asks.

What we will not tell you, and why

We are not going to name the provision that contains the exemptions.

That is a deliberate omission, and it is the most useful thing in this article. Every legal reference on this site is one we have verified in the primary source before publishing it, and the exemption provisions of the Security Services Regulation are not in that verified set. Restating a specific exemption from memory — or from another firm's summary of it — is exactly how a reader ends up relying on a provision that has been amended, narrowed, or that never said what the summary claimed.

If your matter might be exempt, the two places to take that question are the Security Programs Division, which administers licensing under this Act — its licensing information is published at gov.bc.ca — and a lawyer, if anything turns on the answer.

Neither of those is a brush-off. The Division is the body that decides these questions in practice, and a question asked before the work starts costs nothing.

What is at stake if the answer is wrong

Section 2 requires a licence to perform security work or to hold yourself out as performing it. Section 11 requires a business licence to carry on a security business, which s.11 extends to holding oneself out as carrying one on and to soliciting or procuring the services of a security business. Section 44(6) reaches individuals: where a business entity commits the offence, an employee, officer, director or agent who authorizes, permits or acquiesces in it also commits it.

There is a second consequence that matters more to most clients than the regulatory one. Evidence gathered by someone who should not have been gathering it arrives at your dispute carrying a question that has nothing to do with what it shows. If the work is ever going to be looked at by a court, a tribunal, an arbitrator or the other side's counsel, the cheapest possible moment to resolve the licensing question is before it is done.

And licensing is not the only rule

Working out that a licence is required — or that it is not — answers one question only. It says nothing about what may lawfully be done once the work starts.

BC's Privacy Act makes it a tort, actionable without proof of damage, to wilfully and without a claim of right violate another person's privacy (s.1(1)), and it says in terms that privacy may be violated by surveillance whether or not there is any trespass (s.1(4)), measured against what is reasonable in the circumstances (s.1(2)). The Criminal Code prohibits intercepting a private communication (s.184). Those apply to an unlicensed person exactly as they apply to a licensed one — being outside the licensing scheme is not a permission to do more, and if anything it removes the professional obligations that come with a licence (s.14).

The full picture of what a licensed investigator in BC can and cannot do is set out in our companion article, what a BC private investigator can and cannot legally do.

The short version

If somebody is being paid to find out where a person is, what a person has been doing, whether misconduct occurred, where missing property went, or what caused an incident, start from the assumption that you are inside the definition — then check the exemption question properly rather than hoping.

If your matter is legal analysis, an accounting reconstruction, or an ordinary internal process run by your own staff, you may well need a different professional or none at all.

And if you are not sure which of those describes your file, tell us what decision you are trying to make. We will tell you plainly whether it is work we can lawfully do, whether it is somebody else's work, or whether it is a question for the Security Programs Division before anybody spends anything.

Sources

  • Security Services Act (SBC 2007, c. 30), s.1 definitions of "security work" and "private investigator"; s.2 licence required; s.11 security business licence required; s.16(3) conditions on a security business licence; s.44(6) individual liability — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/00_07030_01
  • Security Services Regulation (BC Reg 207/2008), s.14 code of conduct conditions — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/207_2008
  • Personal Information Protection Act (SBC 2003, c. 63), s.13 collection, s.16 use, s.19 disclosure of employee personal information — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/03063_01
  • Privacy Act (RSBC 1996, c. 373), s.1(1), s.1(2), s.1(4) — https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96373_01
  • Criminal Code (RSC 1985, c. C-46), s.184 interception of private communications — https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-184.html
  • Security Programs Division, Province of British Columbia — https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/business/security-services