Madam Speaker, I am very glad to rise to speak to this somewhat bizarre bill.
It is very clear that the government is setting up a bill to kill the do-not-call registry. It is talking about fraud. It is talking about fax machines. We push the government on question after question, and it tells us that just because it is in there does not mean it is actually in there. Then it asks us to speed the bill through. I would be very concerned about rushing through a bill brought forward by the Conservative government without doing due diligence.
Legislation is like trying to push a glacier. It is very cumbersome. People want to develop legislation for this, that or the other, and they tell us we have to have a law. Then we put in a law and we see the concerns. Any time the Conservatives try to bring in a law, they start howling up and down that the opposition are not willing to push it through right away. It tells us we are soft on crime because we do want to actually study a bill on mandatory minimums for furniture theft or whatever else they bring forward.
There are all kinds of booby traps in legislation. Legislation always has unintended consequences. If we do not do the due diligence, we end up using a hammer to whack a bunch of little pieces all over the place without necessarily getting what we wanted.
When we look at a bill, it has to be focused, and it to be focused right. So what are we focused on right now? The bill is focused on the issue of spam.
Is spam a problem? Spam is a big problem. Spam is a problem on two or three different levels. It is an irritant, number one. I get it all the time on my BlackBerry. There is a woman in some cafe who is waiting to meet me and she thinks I look great. This woman who emails me never has my first name. I go on my BlackBerry and someone is selling me products to make certain parts of my body bigger than they need to be. Then I go on my BlackBerry and someone is selling me a beautiful condo on a malaria-infested swamp. Those are irritants, and so I erase them. Sure it costs me a bit of time, but it is not that big a deal.
The bigger problem with spam is the use of it to defraud people across the world. Of course we know about the Nigerian 419 scam. When I ran my magazine, in the days when the fax machine was cutting-edge technology, we got these faxes from Nigeria or Bosnia, or wherever there was a crisis, from someone trying to get out of the country who needed some money. If we gave them money, we would get money back. Everybody knows the 419 scam. But it was cumbersome. It was slow. It had to be done on fax machines. It actually cost them money to do it, so they had to limit the number of scams they could get away with. Surprisingly, a lot of people got snagged in these kinds of frauds.
However, when we moved to digital technology, the ability of these fraud artists anywhere in the world to inundate millions and millions of Internet subscribers with fraudulent claims jumped astronomically, and the costs for doing it became almost nothing.
The vast majority of us look at those fraud emails, and we might be a little upset or we might laugh at them, and we erase them. However, they only need one in a thousand people or one in ten thousand people to succeed. People have lost their savings. There have been senior citizens who have been defrauded, or young people who have lost money. It is so hard to track these fraud artists down. An international effort is needed to deal with them. We have to be able to root these players out, and we have to be get them off our servers.
The other major problem with spam is the use of spyware technology and the use of Trojans, the malignant attempt to destroy people's personal or office computers. That is a level of destruction in our corporate economy that no jurisdiction should be willing to put up with. For all too long in Canada we have sat back and said it is the cost of doing business. However, it should not be the cost of doing business. We need a very clear set of laws to go after spammers, especially given the ability of spam artists to burrow into our computers, take our lists and reproduce them, or use our computers to send spam further and further afield.
The issue is that we need spam legislation. The New Democratic Party will be supporting spam legislation going to committee to ensure we have the tools to shut these operators down.
That being said, there needs to be due diligence. We need to look at this bill carefully, because it is a very large and cumbersome bill. There are a number of elements of this bill that are concerning. They really relate to how the Conservative government bungled the do-not-call registry.
We will go back to the do-not-call registry at a further point. But the idea behind the registry was great. That is how many laws are started. People phone an MP's office and say they are sick and tired of people calling them at home every day and they want something done about it. The government says, “Everyone is upset. We are going to act on it. We are going to have a do-not-call registry”.
Then we look at what happened with the do-not-call registry. The glaring gaps left millions of people who trusted in it exposed.
When there are unknown firms with cryptic names, such as “my broker office”, paying $50 so they can purchase all the numbers on that list in Toronto, we have a big problem. And when the CRTC allows companies with very dubious names to download those lists, we have a big problem.
When I am at work and I see a phone number on my BlackBerry and somebody is selling me a dodgy vacation in the Cayman Islands, I am thinking about how they got my parliamentary phone number. I think back to someone, somewhere paying $50 to get the list of all the Canadian phone numbers. That is a huge glaring problem.
Of course I could stand here and beat up on the Conservative government for completely blowing the registry and not thinking about it, but I am not going to do that. I am going to say that it meant well. Legislation is difficult. It set up a registry because it was responding to a problem. But there were gaping holes in it, and now we have a bigger problem.
The problem was that the lists were left open and all kinds of dodgy operations got access to them. Who knows where they are? They are not subject to Canadian law. They could be calling, for pennies, from anyplace around the world. We are stuck.
Our consumers are being exposed to fraudulent claims. I do not know how many times I have been told that the warranty on my car is just about done. Obviously they have never seen my Pontiac Sunfire or they would know the warranty was done on that a long, long time ago.
The other problem with the do-not-call registry is the enforcement mechanism. The government turned it over to the CRTC. The CRTC deals with just about everything under the sun. Being on the heritage committee, I am not going to beat up on the CRTC, but it can barely keep track of all the broadcast issues and the telecommunications issues.
The CRTC has the job of policing the do-not-call registry. Twenty thousand complaints a month are brought forward. As my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan put forward, Bell reviews those and decides which are the serious ones and which are not. Many of those get tossed out. I am not saying that Bell is tossing out the ones that might implicate itself, but at the end of the day there have been only 70 letters sent out calling for “corrective action”.
Of the 308 members in this House of Commons, how many have received dodgy phone calls from which this list is supposed to protect them? I bet there are 70 right here alone. Then we add our family members and people who phone our constituency offices and there are a lot more than 70 people who have had reason to complain.
For all the registry's hoopla, we have allowed millions of names to be siphoned off by fraud artists. There have been only 70 letters calling for corrective action. That is a big issue. It is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Talking about the complete failure of the phone registry brings us back to Bill C-27. There is one view that Bill C-27 might try to change the registry by saying there is an opt-in clause as opposed to an opt-out clause, that Canadians would not have to receive a message from anybody unless they have given prior consent.
This is where I have a problem with the enforceability of the bill. Requiring someone to get prior consent before they contact people, I think in the digital age is going to prove almost impossible. There might be people, who are not very active in the digital world, who do not want to be called unless they call the other people first, but the vast majority of transactions are happening without prior consent.
This is where we get into some real problems with the enforceability of the act. If we try to draw too wide a net on spammers, we are going to get caught up with a whole bunch of business transactions. Some of them are very legitimate and some are less so, but will we get to the spammers? I am concerned about this. I think we need to bring this to committee to hear from witnesses on how practical that provision would be.
If the government brings in an opting-in clause rather than an opting-out clause in this spammer's bill, then conceivably the opt-out clause for the phone registry would not be needed any more. Contrary to what the Conservative Party is telling us, on page 56, clause 86 says that sections 41.1 to 41.7 of the act would be repealed. That is the do-not-call registry.
We are being assured, after many, many questions to the Conservative ranks, that repealing the do-not-call registry is not the same as repealing the do-not-call registry. We would only repeal the do-not-call registry if it becomes law and then we decide to enact it.
We are being asked, as opposition members, to quickly push this legislation through so that once again we show we are tough on spammers. If it is in this legislation, then why not say it is in this legislation? Why not say we had a problem with the phone registry, we blew it and it is not working. The opt-out clause does not work so we are going for an opt-in clause. Put that on the table. The Conservatives did not do that. They have hidden it in the microscopic print.
That is not the way to enact legislation. Legislation is not hiding things in a bill and then calling on the opposition members to quickly vote for it to show they are supporting the government. We need to make sure this legislation will work.
The idea of multi-million dollar fines for major spam fraudsters is a perfectly reasonable solution. If we are going after the malignant spyware out there, we need serious criminal penalities. That has to be in the bill. The NDP supports that.
The problem, again, goes back to the dodgy way the phone registry played out with enforcement. Can we really expect that the CRTC, with its inability to respond to the 20,000 calls a month it got about the phone registry, is going to have the tools to go after these operators? That is the question.
I suggest that we need to look at thinning the bill down, making sure our legal teams have the clear mandate to go after the people we really need to go after, draw the net a little smaller and make sure we can do this under police powers. We are never going to get the spam cleared up until we have a way of enforcing it. At the end of the day it is very bulky, slow moving legislation that ends up being challenged in the courts. We support moving forward with this legislation, but it has to be done right.
In my time, I have seen many bills crafted in the House and passed with many nods, only to reveal a month or six months down the road that we did not see something.
For example, there was the voter registration bill. It went through once. New Democrats certainly were raising a hue and cry about problems with the bill at that time and a million rural people were disenfranchised. The bill had to be brought back a second time and there were still problems with it. We had legal experts and student organizations which said that, if we do not make the proper changes, hundreds of thousands of people will be disenfranchised and it will be subject to a court challenge. Now we have Elections Canada looking at that bill right now that had become law and it will probably be subject to a court challenge, which means it would come back for legislation again.
If we were in the private sector and did such a bad job once, twice and we were looking at it three times, everyone would get fired. Here, we just wait until it comes back to committee. I do not think that is a good enough way to do business.
On the issue of spam, of all the issues we argue about in the House of Commons, we can all agree no one likes spam. We can all agree that we want to be able to go after the fraud artists, but where we might diverge is on whether or not we rush through legislation that is not thought out.
So, we will support this going to committee. We want to see a bill that is enforceable, that hits the targets that it needs, and that it does not reproduce the debacle of the phone registry that started out as a good idea, but never delivered the goods.
