Bill C-27 (Historical)

Electronic Commerce Protection Act

An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act

This enactment establishes a regulatory framework to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities.
It enacts the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, which prohibits the sending of commercial electronic messages without the prior consent of the recipient and provides rules governing the sending of those types of messages, including a mechanism for the withdrawal of consent. It also prohibits other practices that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, such as those relating to the alteration of data transmissions and the unauthorized installation of computer programs. In addition, that Act provides for the imposition of administrative monetary penalties by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, after taking into account specified factors. It also provides for a private right of action that enables a person affected by an act or omission that constitutes a contravention under that Act to obtain an amount equal to the actual amount of the loss or damage suffered, or expenses incurred, and statutory damages for the contravention.
This enactment amends the Competition Act to prohibit false or misleading commercial representations made electronically.
It also amends the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to prohibit the collection of personal information by means of unauthorized access to computer systems, and the unauthorized compiling of lists of electronic addresses.
Finally, it makes related amendments to the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act and the Telecommunications Act.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

I do not have a motion to propose, but this is to committee members.

Why do we not instruct department officials to create something for us to exclude the National Do Not Call List? In other words, the purpose would be to not have this fairly recent measure included in Bill C-27. You have to admit that a year ago is pretty recent. Bill C-27 should not affect or do away with the National Do Not Call List.

[Robert Vincent, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Earlier, Mr. Leduc was saying that the list works very well. When the head of the CRTC appeared before us, I asked him whether the list was working well. He said that everything was going swell. Even when I asked about holes, he said that that was not the case.

My main question is this: Why use Bill C-27 to try to do away with the National Do Not Call List?

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

You may or may not be surprised to learn what Desjardins—which owns a number of businesses—did to comply with the National Do Not Call List. According to its estimates, the company invested or spent approximately $5 million. That is also for the information of the committee members.

I am almost certain that any businesses that are aware of this intention in Bill C-27 would, in my opinion, be very surprised, since most of them adapted to the measures that the government put forward a year ago. It cost them money.

Desjardins expressed its concern to us. There is concern as to whether the implementation or amendment of the provisions in Bill C-27 will come with costs. Desjardins believes that the National Do Not Call List works well. What is being asked is that Bill C-27 not include the possibility of doing away with the National Do Not Call List.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you very much.

On a number of occasions at committee we've heard people calling for the removal of sections referring to the “do not call” list. Mr. Palmer is trying to clarify that while the sections under Bill C-27 will go forward, they will not be gazetted but will be available to be gazetted.

I appreciate your assurances of public consultation, but if you are willing to go through public consultations and seek the viewpoints of others who have only had this for 13 months and spent the last two years implementing it, why wouldn't you hold out until it's required and we can have some assurances that you will do public consultations and ensure that things happening to the “do not call list” are occurring, which would be effective for both the consumers as well as for businesses?

[Philip Palmer]

No, it is not in Bill C-27. But based on our knowledge of other legislation, we can assure the committee that consultations on the necessary regulations will take place before the provisions come into force, prior to the transition.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

But it is not in Bill C-27.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

If I may, Mr. Chair, I have another question.

Does the bill set out the obligation to hold consultations before the provision about eliminating the list is added to Bill C-27?

[Philip Palmer]

We tried to find a technological difference between the National Do Not Call List and what is in Bill C-27, the provisions dealing with spam and others. In the end, it was impossible to separate the two. In light of developments such as Voice Over Internet Protocol, we were fully aware that we might have to act fairly swiftly in certain situations to ensure that there is always a regime in place to protect Canadians.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

To summarize what you just said, you do not intend to do away with the National Do Not Call List. You are waiting to see how things develop. That being said, we can assume there is some uncertainty on your part.

Why include a provision in Bill C-27 to deal with something that may never happen?

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

I would like to thank the Conservative Party for allowing me to bring this matter up. We have just seen that we could have debated a question on clause 64. But I am going to talk about clause 86 exclusively. I have some questions for the department representatives.

You seem determined to abolish the National Do Not Call List. Why do you want to include the provisions allowing it to be abolished in Bill C-27?

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I find that comment by the member opposite very curious. I will start my comments by saying that I think he has forgotten who caused the last election. It was in fact the Prime Minister who walked over to the Governor General's residence and precipitated the last election, therefore killing every bill on the order paper, including a bill dealing with this very matter which was introduced by the Liberal member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I find the member's comment curious that he is blaming the frequency of elections, every single one of which the Conservatives precipitated in the last two instances, and using that as an excuse for why this was not adopted.

A point that bears mentioning is that in 2005 the Liberal Party introduced the modernization of investigative techniques act, which is essentially the same bill that we are working with here today. With very minor modifications, it is essentially the same legislation, so why would it take four years essentially to deal with the same bill that we had written so many years ago?

The member talked about things like voice over Internet protocol in terms of changes to Internet service provisions. All of those things were present four years ago when that work was done, yet the government refused to introduce it. Even recently, when this was brought back, the decision that was made by the government was to bring it in at the end of the last session. It was in the last week immediately leading up to the summer recess when suddenly this was a priority put on the order paper. It languished there for months and months and now the government is bringing it back. And the Conservatives have the audacity to try to talk about us delaying bills. The Conservatives themselves have had their crime bills sitting on the order paper, not only for months but in some instances for years, only to bring them back when they are a hit politically.

What they do is when there is a scandal, the most recent one being the cheque scandal, they decide to resurrect their crime bills that they have been ignoring for months on end. Suddenly it is an imperative national priority to deal with whatever particular crime bill they put on the table at that particular moment, when we all know that the real objective is to change the political channel away from whatever political troubles they are having. In this particular instance, it is the cheque fiasco. As this bill has been ignored and ignored and left to languish and we have been calling again and again for it to be dealt with, we can know that is essentially what their strategy is.

Now they have come to this bill and said that it is important to deal with it but only after we have been pushing for it for four years. I hope something does not distract them and we do not find this bill suddenly being lost yet again.

It is important to mention that the bill we have been advocating for the last four years is badly needed by police. Technology has changed and evolved in many different ways. While criminals have evolved with it, our legislation simply has not. For the last number of years while the Conservatives have been sitting on this, whether the criminals are involved in cyber fraud or are using technology like BlackBerries in the commission of crimes, to which the police cannot get access, the criminals have had a huge advantage against the law enforcement agencies.

One of the areas in which they have had a great advantage is in their anonymity. People are able to do things on line and police are not able to uncover who exactly they are, even if they know they are committing acts of a criminal nature. Police have been calling on us for years to change that and only now are the Conservatives bringing something forward to do something about it.

I have had many conversations with police, not just about things that were mentioned by the hon. member, but about other things, such as child pornography. Obviously child pornography is a deep concern and we want to root that out and give police every tool to be able to go after those individuals. I have also spoken with the police about instances where a criminal is known to have a particular phone and his whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The police want to be able to use the GPS tracking device in that device in order to figure out where the individual is. The current laws do not allow the police to do that.

I was talking to the chief of police in Calgary who was expressing deep frustration at the number of dial-a-dope operations. Individuals are using cell phones almost like a pizza service to deliver drugs to people's doors. When the police find these cell phones they are unable to access them because of the encryption software. The maker of the device is under no obligation to help open it up to reveal all of the phone numbers and the client base. It is a crime that is almost impossible to catch someone doing because it is locked behind that wall of encryption. That has been going on for years and the Conservatives have been refusing to give the police the tools they need to deal with it, even though solutions are present.

At the same time, it is important to mention that one of the things we are going to have to look at and study in committee is to ensure that there is balance. A number of people have expressed concerns that a law of this nature could be misused to allow access into people's searching history and people's personal messages or could be used maliciously by somebody to gain access to people's Internet search records and history. We have to ensure that balance exists. We have to protect individual rights to protect people's freedom to do what they want without somebody being able to go through willy-nilly, without warrant, their information. At the same time, we have to provide police with the opportunities to chase those individuals who we have reasonable grounds to believe have committed a crime.

It is worth mentioning as we talk about this bill, that the Conservative approach to crime is, I think, in general, disingenuous. We listened all day today to speeches by members about how the Liberal Party had held up a variety of bills. Of course, factually, that is entirely incorrect.

If we were to talk about the Liberal Party record in this session of Parliament in terms of bills that we have supported and helped to accelerate, I can list the following: Bill C-2, which was an omnibus bill which included provisions from Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27, and Bill C-22; Bill C-14; Bill C-15; Bill C-25; and Bill C-26. It is important to mention that in every instance we tried to get those bills accelerated and pushed forward.

That does not stop the Conservatives from talking about other parties holding up their crime bills. The problem is the facts do not match their rhetoric. In this specific instance and many others, the reality is the exact opposite of what they have said. In many instances, the Conservative crime bills have been languishing on the order paper, forgotten. They are sitting there waiting to be implemented. The Conservatives are not waiting for the right time for the public interest, not waiting for the right time to ensure there is adequate information to get the bills passed, but they are waiting for the right political moment to put the bills forward to try to turn the political channel.

If that were not bad enough, the other reality is that they are fundamentally letting down the Canadian public by only offering one solution to crime, and that solution invariably is to lock up people.

I do not have any problem with the notion of tough sentences. We have to have harsh, stiff sentences for people who commit serious crimes. However, if tough sentences were the only answer, then places like Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Detroit would be some of the safest cities in North America. In fact, we know the opposite to be true.

The reality is that places with the stiffest sentences are more often than not some of the most dangerous cities in North America. Why? The Americans are being crushed under the weight of their own correctional system. They are literally in a position where there are so many people pouring into the prisons that they cannot possibly keep up with the costs of building all of the prisons, let alone the programs and services to ensure that people do not repeat offend. In fact, in California the situation has become so bad that its rate of recidivism is now 70%. They are creating crime factories. People go in for a minor crime and come out as a major criminal. It is like putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

That is the strategy the Conservatives are trying to bring here: a failed Republican strategy in dealing with crime that we know as a fact does not work. They are trying to apply it here to change the channel, to use it as a political game changer. If they are in trouble with the cheque fiasco, they talk about locking up people longer. If they are in trouble because a minister is caught in a fiscal indiscretion, they talk about locking people up longer. That is what they do.

I think most of them, I would hope most of them, realize that it is a disastrous strategy, that it leads to less safe communities, that it leads to billions of dollars in additional costs, and that it is exactly following down the road that even Republican governors say was a huge mistake to walk down. If anyone doubts that, I will point quickly to what has happened specifically with incarceration in the United States compared with Canada.

In 1981, before the United States began a similar agenda on which the Conservatives are now embarking, locking people up longer and longer, the gap between the rate of incarceration in Canada and the U.S. was much narrower. In Canada, 91 per 100,000 people were incarcerated, while the figure in the United States was 243 for every 100,000 people.

By 2001, Canada's rate had grown only slightly in terms of the number of people who were incarcerated, to 101 incarcerated for every 100,000 people, while in the United States that rate had soared to 689 for every 100,000, a rate almost 700% higher than that in Canada. In that same period of time, Canada and the U.S. had the same decline in their overall rate of crime. Imagine that.

The United States' rate of incarceration went up 500% over ours, and yet over that same period of time we had the identical reduction in the amount of crime. The only difference was that 500% more individuals were being incarcerated per 100,000 people, and it cost billions of dollars more.

In fact, if we continue to follow this model suggested by the Conservatives and we extrapolate to the same path that the Republicans took the United States, where they put them right to the brink, we are talking about roughly $9 billion a year in additional costs to have the same rate of incarceration.

As for the difference for public safety, well, unfortunately, I wish I could say it just kept it the same, that the only impact of that was the loss of $9 billion a year, but we all know that that $9 billion a year has to come from somewhere. We have already seen where the Conservatives' priorities are on crime. Let us take a look at the crime prevention budget.

Since 2005 the crime prevention budget has been slashed by more than 50%. That is actual spending. At the same time as they are increasing sentences and chasing after a failed Republican model, the Conservatives are slashing the money that is given to crime prevention. It is crazy. Anybody who would look at it objectively would say that this is a path to disaster, and yet that is exactly the road they have decided to head down.

There are opportunities here to be smarter on crime, to listen to police, to talk to them about what the real solutions are, to invest in prevention, to invest in making sure people turn down the right path instead of the wrong one. I had the opportunity to go around with the former chief of police in Regina and see a neighbourhood which is designated as one of the most dangerous in Canada. He was able to show me a home that had no septic system, no heat and where the child in that home was going to school hungry. That same child predictably, just scant years later, could be committing his or her first crime by starting to get involved in drugs.

For more than 60% of our inmates, addiction is the root cause of the problem and yet they do not get help. They get thrown into prison and forgotten about, and they come out worse because the core problem was never addressed. In this case it would be an addiction problem that sent them there. They go in for a minor crime, usually break and enter, and they have an addiction. They go into a system that is not providing them any rehabilitation services, and they come out and commit worse crimes. So goes the cycle. It is a constant cycle of things getting continually ever worse.

When we look at our prison system and we ask where these criminals come from, not often enough do we take a hard look at that. Imagine. Sixty per cent of those in prison face addiction issues. Over 10% face serious mental health issues. Not only are our prisons turning into crime factories, but the Conservatives are trying to use them as hospitals, by sending people with serious mental health issues into prisons. The prisons are so ill-equipped to deal with them that they are putting them in solitary confinement. They are often released directly from solitary confinement into the general population, only to reoffend again. Whether it is the facilities in St. John's, Grandview or different facilities across the country, we see this time and time again.

The reality here is we have a bill that has been called for by police for years. The government is only now finally bringing it forward, after its having been on the table since 2005. It is trying to use crime as a political game changer, misrepresenting what crime is really about and how to stop it, and at the same time it is taking us down a path that has been tried and failed before in the United States.

We need to do better than this. We need to be honest on crime and offer real solutions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 39th meeting of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.

We're here to review Bill C-27, the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, clause by clause. This is a continuation of the clause-by-clause consideration of our last meeting. We will begin today by considering clause 63.

(On clause 63--Regulations--Governor in Council)

I understand that we have two amendments to clause 63, government amendments 49.1 and 50.

You all should have in front of you a package of amendments that are listed in order.

Go ahead, Madam Coady.

Industry

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the government introduced anti-spam legislation, Bill C-27, and now it is at risk of being weakened.

Both the Liberals and the Bloc have left consumers wondering as they cave to the corporate lobby and move motions that are against the public interest.

Now the government has an amendment on the table that would allow serious violations of individual privacy, as private companies would get access to Canadians' personal computers.

Why does the minister believe personal privacy is not an issue and that computers can be invaded by others? Why is he softening on spam? Will the minister stand up for Internet users or sell them out to the spammers and the fraudsters?

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

If I understand correctly, you've detailed the measures. This part of Bill C-27 was originally much more restricted. What was presented to us at the outset included no explanation. It was really an addition. Are you providing more details, clarification, or are you making changes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Order, please.

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology and to our 38th meeting on this day, October 21, 2009.

We're here pursuant to the order of reference of Friday, May 8, 2009, concerning Bill C-27, otherwise known as the Electronic Commerce Protection Act.

Today, we will be going clause by clause on this bill. So without further ado, we'll begin.

Before I do, I just want to recognize our three departmental officials here. We have Madam DiFrancesco, who is director general of the electronic commerce branch; we have Mr. Palmer, who is the senior general counsel of the legal services group; and we have Monsieur André Leduc, who is the policy analyst with the e-commerce policy group.

I believe I have an intervention from Mr. Lake.

Go ahead.