You're welcome, Mr. Chair.
To the witnesses, thank you for being here today.
I just want to focus, if I could, for a moment on this opt-in versus opt-out, because there seems to be a philosophical divide among proponents and opponents--maybe not of the whole bill, because most people are in favour of the bill, but of certain sections of the bill, based on opt-in versus opt-out. I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. I have a scenario for you.
Whether you opt in or opt out, the scenario starts with a transaction that occurs at some point between a consumer and a company. Right at that point, there's a divide. There's the marketing strategy, I guess, that would be undertaken under this legislation, and then there's the marketing strategy that would be undertaken under an opt-out regime.
Under the opt-in regime, it seems as though the marketing strategy would be for the company to clearly indicate a choice in some form, on a form, for whether customers want to receive more information from the company itself or its partners. It seems like the marketing strategy would be to try to persuade the customer, the consumer, to say yes to that.
I would think that if you're doing an electronic transaction, you'd probably actually require the customer to answer yes or no. I mean, that would be a logical marketing strategy and a good strategy if you're a marketer. I come from a marketing and sales background, so I'm trying to think about the way I would approach this. It seems to me under that this option we have a fairly transparent marketing strategy there.
Under the opt-out regime, it seems to me that you would, from a marketing strategy--I would be doing this--probably try to have a form that's long enough so that nobody reads through the whole form, and then you would hide the option to opt out somewhere within that form--