Industry committee  That's it, spam. How do you make yourself known? What is the difference between a legitimate business and an individual who is trying to sell viagra? That's not a way to... Trying to contact everybody on the planet in one shot: ultimately, that's what spam is.

Industry committee  No. In our bill, there are penalties for those companies, even though they are American. As Philip said earlier, they could be liable to civil actions—in the private sense—because Quebec consumers would say they didn't expect to receive that. Decisions made by the civil courts i

Industry committee  We did consider it, but before we put anything forward in the legislation we also considered the adverse. Let's say that instead of an 18-month existing business relationship, we set it at 36 months. Two years ago, I was a Bell customer. If we stretch this out too far, it's going

Industry committee  The biggest difference between telemarketing and e-mailing is that there's a two-step process for telemarketing. If I'm on the phone with somebody and they tell me to never call again, I have to write down their name and input it into the computer. In 99 cases out of 100, if I se

Industry committee  Not the way we've boxed the case. You have to have an existing and ongoing business relationship, so you have to be either my insurance agent or you have to have that expressly consented-to relationship for me to refer somebody to you.

Industry committee  Based on the way it's drafted, you don't, because it's just a discussion you had. You don't have a personal or family relationship or an existing business relationship. You don't really have a relationship of any kind, outside of the phone discussion you had with this person. T

Industry committee  To be honest, we wanted to make allowances for it but were afraid of putting this type of thing in the bill. On the idea behind the breadth and scope of it, you have to think of this as a balloon. If we keep poking holes in it, at some point it's going to explode. The whole idea

Industry committee  To be frank, we were advised not to put it in there and that the committee would do it.

Industry committee  In most other legislation that we've seen, they'll come back and report after either two or three years to see, as was the case in Australia.... They reported in 2005 and they've recently gone through a parliamentary review of their legislation. We're absolutely open to doing the

Industry committee  Do you mean in terms of limiting that transitional provision? Again, it's a provision for legitimate businesses that have an existing business relationship. It's really about the small and medium sized enterprises: the real estate agents, your insurance broker. It's to give them

Industry committee  Basically the idea is that we put a box around referrals. We're allowing them, but we're saying they have to following the following rules. The following rules are these: for anybody to make a referral, they have to have that family or personal relationship with the person they'r

Industry committee  The legislation is quite similar to that which was enacted in Australia a few years ago. They saw an immediate reduction in the amount of spam that originated from Australia. They dropped out of the top ten spam-originating countries almost overnight. We know—because we lack legi

Industry committee  Clause 6 requires people to identify themselves when sending out a commercial electronic message. They also have to identify the company on whose behalf they're sending the commercial electronic message. For example, if The Bay hires an e-mail marketer to send out an e-flyer, the

Industry committee  To be honest, from my point of view we're not going to lose much. I think most of what we've put in there are allowances for legitimate businesses to carry on and use this platform to communicate with clients and prospective clients. In terms of getting after the actual spammers,

Industry committee  Again—and Mike said this last time—it's to a maximum of $1 million, or to a maximum of $10 million, and I've gone through the whole process of the factors that they have to take into consideration before making a final assessment of what the monetary penalty in fact should be. Bu