Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-27. We in the NDP firmly believe this legislation is long overdue. We think there are a lot of improvements that could be made to this bill, as with any bill. Therefore, we are certainly prepared to send it off to committee and hope that the committee can do the job that is necessary to make it a better bill.
There is a whole series of questions and answers that we have heard over the last couple of days that have shed some light on the history of this bill and the details of it, but I want to comment on an article from CBC News. It says that Canada is a source of over nine billion spam messages a day. In a study, it was found that nine out of 10 emails worldwide are spam, according to a Cisco Systems security firm. That was as of December 16, 2008.
The article states:
Canadian computers — many of them unwittingly — send out over nine billion spam e-mails a day, almost five per cent of all global spam traffic, according to a report from network and internet security firm Cisco.
In an annual security report released Monday, Cisco estimated almost 200 billion messages per day, or 90 per cent of all e-mails sent worldwide — can be defined as spam, double the volume of the previous year.
E-mail spam is rarely sent from the computers of the spammers themselves...Instead they use a number of techniques, from phishing scams, to e-mail with attached malware, to hijacking the computers of unwitting people.
It sounds pretty scary, actually.
The article goes on to say:
The spammers then use these networks of computers — called botnets — to send out more spam.
While many spammers still send out mass-mailing spam to millions of untargeted recipients, web security software is usually able to filter these messages, the company said.
We have all known over the years that it is almost mandatory today for people to invest in Norton Internet Security and McAfee. I have spent literally hundreds of dollars in a year trying to keep a dozen computers in the office safe from viruses, and so on. This is a really big business and it is growing in leaps and bounds. So it is certainly long overdue that we step in.
I have mentioned several times that one of my favourite long-time MPs in the House, the member for Pickering—Scarborough East, brought in a bill way back in 2003. That is when we should have brought in the legislation. At this point, under normal circumstances, we would probably be looking at having made amendments to his original bill, had the government of the day done the right thing.
I can recall back in 2000 being asked to coordinate the Manitoba e-commerce bill. It was the most comprehensive e-commerce bill of its type in Canada of the day, and perhaps it is even today. We were able to get the five warring departments in the government together, because that is what it boils down to at the end of the day, and got them to agree that we had to proceed with this e-commerce legislation.
We followed the Uniform Law Conference model. We mixed and matched some things and added some consumer legislation, which I am not aware has been replicated anywhere else in the country up this point. We decided that if we wanted to promote purchases on the Internet, we should try to provide as much consumer protection to the public as possible.
We borrowed a little idea that had been adopted in three or four American states as of that time but nowhere in Canada. We put a provision in the act to provide that if any Manitoban purchased a product or service online and did not receive the product or service, the credit card company would be held responsible for reimbursement.
When we went to committee on this issue, we had the credit card companies, understandably, show up and make representations about how onerous this would be. We went ahead and passed the legislation anyway. We have had no problems, as far as I know, with the credit card companies, complaining that this was something bad.
As my colleague from Timmins mentioned yesterday, at the end of the day, we may reconfigure this bill a little differently from what it is right now. It may be a little light on the enforcement side. We have seen how weak the enforcement has been on the do-not-call list, which has only been around for a year. The very best that has come out of it has been nothing more than a few warning letters from the CRTC. No one has been prosecuted or chased around seriously about any aspect. That has turned out to be a big disaster for the government, which is trying hide its failure and collapse it partly through this bill.
What we may have to do at the end is have a little more emphasis on the policing side of things and a little less emphasis on organizations like the CRTC, which do not have the resources and, as a result, do not have the track record of being really tough on much over the past little while.
That was a suggestion the member made yesterday, and that may well be a good idea. He wanted to focus in, specifically, on the problem.
I do not see any problem in even going the other way a bit and expanding the scope of the bill to include what I just mentioned before, some consumer-type legislation. We can look at the Manitoba legislation. There was more than just the credit card issue that I had mentioned. There were two or three other issues. I am sure that in the intervening years, which has been now nine years or so, there must be some legislation in Quebec, or Ontario, or Alberta or another province that we could perhaps use in framing this legislation.
I am not suggesting that somehow we should put this off for another four or five years in order to get it right. However, I do think we should do as much consulting as possible. We should get as many people, particularly people with small businesses, in to make presentations on the bill as soon as possible so we do not have this huge compliance problem at the end of the day.
I will give an example. I will use a real estate agent as an example. If a real estate agent contacts a previous client who is outside of the three year rule and has not done business or does not have a contract with the real estate agent, is he or she violating the rules? Are we going to make criminals out of thousands of real estate agents across the country who may unwittingly and unknowingly get themselves into trouble over situations like this?
I really feel we have to go through the process. We have to contact the Real Estate Association, the Insurance Bureau of Canada, all the different small business organizations and get their input into this so we do not end up with a big problem on our hands at the end of the day.
Overall, the approach is a solid approach. I will tell members why. The do-not-call list was to allow people who were in the basket to get out of that basket. It is negative option offers. I do not know whether members are familiar with that concept, but this is something we deal with in Consumer Affairs all the time. Certainly insurance companies practise negative option offers.
For example, a home insurance policy, at one point, had sewer backup coverage on it. It would be too administratively expensive, for example, for the insurance company to contact each one of its customers and consult them on the issue. It would become cost prohibitive and the product would probably cost a lot more. Therefore, insurance companies automatically, for maybe $2.00 or $3,00, a small amount, add the coverage on all policies across Canada. People who do not want the coverage have to get back to the insurance company to have it taken it off. Cable companies do that, as well. We have seen that in Manitoba. We have seen that across the country.
Some people get angry about it, even though all they have to do is phone and get their name taken off. However, some jurisdictions have banned the practice of negative option offers, even though it is very administratively efficient and probably, in a way, good in some ways for the consumer in terms of cost.
It is the idea that people are going to have stuff put on their policies or on their cable bills without them consenting to it and without them knowing about it. That was the original do-not-call list approach. Everyone was put in the basket and they were told to phone and get themselves off this list. That was the approach.
Now the government has smartened up on this whole issue and it is taking the approach that people have to consent to be on the list. That is the right way to go. It is a little more cumbersome. It is going to take a little more time. It is not going to make people of small businesses overly happy, but this just did not start yesterday. For the last few years, different businesses across the country have been doing exactly that. For the last three or four years, they have been getting consent forms signed by their customers when they come in.
The last time people renewed their home insurance policy, or their automobile insurance policy and certainly real estate agent activity, they have been asked to sign a form, whether they know it or not and they probably did. That form will give the person the right to contact them.
Any time people want to cease contact with the business, then they can do that. Those businesses know that over the last couple of years they just cannot start phoning people and sending out emails at will, as they used to in the old days. The whole picture has changed and small business understands that.
It took some getting used to, but I think many of the businesses now accept that it is a good idea and they have put in place these practices of getting the consent from the customers, and that is a good thing. This bill deals with that.
There is a very interesting observation on this whole process and I do not know how many people know about it. Therefore, I will take the opportunity in my remaining time to explain it. It is an article on Geist on spam. I really was not aware of this problem.
The article states that “the government quietly lays the groundwork for needed overhaul in the do-not-call list”. We thought we were dealing with Bill C-27, a bill dealing with spam. Instead it turns out we are dealing with the problems of the government's do-not-call list, which has turned into a big disaster for it. It got its political points out of it and it was a good thing for it to do. However, it turned out to be a big mess and now the government is afraid of embarrassment, so it is trying to quietly solve the problems with that list by dealing with this list.
The article states:
Four years after the National Task Force on Spam unanimously recommended that the Canadian government introduce anti-spam legislation, the Government today took an important step forward by tabling Bill C-27, the Electronic Commerce Protection Act.
It further states:
—marketers must obtain consumer consent before sending commercial electronic messages...While...long overdue, one of the most significant changes was not reported or even included in the government’s briefing materials. Buried at the very end of the 69-page bill, are provisions that would lay the groundwork to kill the National Do-Not-Call list.
I recall back nine years ago when we brought in this huge omnibus bill on the electronic commerce legislation in Manitoba. It is right about the time that Jane Stewart was having all her troubles with her database issues.
One of our major driving forces for our legislation was that we had to get the legislative ability to enable the use of the federal business number. As a government, we were very concerned. We were very concerned that this legislation had to be brought through the house. We were also aware that the opposition, if it ever took the time to read it, would see that there were a lot things in there with which it could probably find fault. One of them was shared databases and things like that.
That is why, as a government, we ended up making the bill bigger and bigger and at the end of the day, putting some good consumer legislation in there so when we sent out a press release, we talked about the consumer legislation, but not about the database and business number issues and so on.
Thank goodness members of the Conservative opposition of the day were not overly active and did not pay attention, so the bill went through and they did not ask any questions about it, in my view, for the benefit of the province. Had we been the opposition at that time, we would have torn it apart.
Whenever I see a bill that big, and this one is 69 pages, I look through it. A lawyer is sitting to my right and she is nodding in agreement. When we see a bill that big, we want to find out what are these guys hiding. I bet there is something in there the Conservatives are trying to get through by calling it something else.
In any event, this gentleman says that “the proposed approach is very complicated”. That is good to know. He says that It boils down to the fact that the government is repealing the provisions that establish and govern the do-not-call list. Guess what? It is in the bill.
The member for Timmins—James Bay mentioned it yesterday. If this is not a big issue, then why is it in the bill? He says that in its place the approach of requiring an opt-in would apply, which I see as fine, meaning Canadians would no longer need to register their phone numbers on the do-not-call list. That is good too. It saves people a lot of trouble. He says that instead the presumption would be that telemarketers would not call without prior consent, which we discussed, and that it would also bring in stronger penalties, up to $10 million and few exceptions.
He goes on to say that although the do-not-call list is less than a year old, change cannot come soon enough. He says that it faced severe criticism earlier this year when it was reported that out-of-country telemarketers, who are out of the regular reach of the CRTC, are accessing the list and making unwanted calls to Canadians, and that with more than six million numbers registered on the list, the prospect of do-not-call list registration leading to more calls rather than less instantly becomes a disturbing reality.
What is this man saying? He is saying all those people last year, who responded the minute the government passed the do-not-call legislation, flooded the phone lines, phoning in, giving their number, asking to be taken off the list. Offshore companies simply accessed that whole list of numbers and used it, totally defeating the purpose. I did not phone last year to take my name off the list and I guess it was good. Had I phoned, I would have ended up with tons and tons of spam.
I can see why the Conservatives are hanging their heads over there and do not want to talk about something like this because this is a big embarrassment. They should just own up to it and say that they goofed up, that they made a mistake and that this is how we will fix it. We see that is exactly what they are doing right now.
He goes on to say that while the misuse of the do not call list remains a concern, a review of the thousands of pages of internal government documents released under the Access to Information reveals it is only the tip of the iceberg. That means there is a lot more underneath there if it looks like an iceberg.
He says that in addition to the lax distribution policies, the enforcement side of the do not call list raises serious alarm bells, with the majority of complaints being dismissed as invalid. He says that without CRTC investigation, the appearance of a conflict of interest and sorting through complaints on a regulator that has been content to issue warnings rather than levying the tough penalties contained in the law.
I said there were 70 warning letters that were sent out. This gets more interesting. I am going to run out of time, but if anyone wants to read the remaining paragraphs I will be very happy to make copies. There are many more interesting things in the letter. I will draw to a close and allow for any questions that might come my way.
