Thank you very much, Mr. Leduc.
Thank you, Mr. Rota.
We're going to go to Mr. Wallace now, but before we do, one of the interesting things in this discussion is that the one factor we've not heard any testimony on or any discussion about is the IT costs associated with all the spam.
I can tell you from my previous life that we spent thousands of dollars trying to control this stuff and we were never completely successful. I don't know about members around this table, but I'm constantly bumping up against the limit on my mailbox size, which I think is about 100 megabytes of mailbox storage space. And if 90% of what we get is spam that we don't actually receive because of filters, that means that the House of Commons' IT department probably has over and above that, let's say, 900 megs of storage of e-mail clutter that they have on the back end, which they've got to clean out every so often. And the Internet connections that Parliament has to the outside world are probably, you know, 30%, 40%, or 50% larger than they have to be just to handle all the spam.
So you add it up, and if you're looking at $100 per person per year—let's say $70 a year of extra storage costs, $30 a year for extra access to the Internet through T3 or T2 pipes, you know—and 5,000 accounts on the Hill, it's half a million dollars a year in lost productivity because of all this spam that's floating out there, and that's never factored into any of the discussion here.
I can tell you from personal experience that we spent tens of thousands of dollars, in my life as an IT executive, trying to put in place systems, software on routers, software on exchange servers, increased bandwidth to the net, in order to compensate for all this junk coming down the pipe.
Without further ado, I'll go to Mr. Wallace.