Bill C-28 (Historical)

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 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, 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.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I was going to start off with some of the technical matters at the very beginning, including the title of the bill and some of the functions in clause-by-clause material, but I do want to pick up on one thing that was brought up by my colleague from Sudbury.

He talked about seniors, and this is a perfect illustration of why we work in this House to legislate practices like this, because many seniors now are using devices such as Facebook and text messaging. Pictures can be transferred through our phones now and that sort of thing. A lot of seniors get these emails and a lot of them become victims as a result in many cases. One of the reasons is that it is hard for public relations campaigns, such as Crime Stoppers and others, to keep the pace going with the methods with which they are communicating and getting their bad products out there. It started out with just emails. Now we have things such as text messaging and Facebook.

My hon. colleague brings up a good point. We are looking at victims now, and because the seniors' ranks are becoming much larger because of what we call the baby-boom effect, we do have to keep pace with legislation much more quickly than we have been thus far. I would have to say that we have been a little too delayed in this particular bill, but nonetheless we have it here and it is nice to see that all parties are in support and that we are going to do this exercise once again. I say “once again”, because we started out with Bill C-27, which was left over from the last session. Now we find ourselves with Bill C-28, and some modifications have taken place since then, which I will touch upon in just a few moments, but this indeed does look to enact an electronic commerce protection act, prohibiting the sending of electronic commercial messages, or spam email, without the prior consent of recipients.

One of the key elements of this is going to be the idea of consent and just how we have to formalize this. Not only that, but we have had to expand the idea of what consent means, whether it is implied or not. As we know, if we are dealing with websites, many of them prompt us for contact information and there is always that disclaimer or a box that we have to click on, giving consent to receive unsolicited email. That has to be brought into context.

We have to talk about the international context, which my hon. colleague from Mississauga South mentioned earlier. That is to say that in the context of the G8 we are the last ones to get on board, so it is time we saddled up to this particular issue and did it the right way. I would implore all members to send this to committee as soon as possible, similar to the last go-round with Bill C-27. Some modifications were made in Bill C-27 that help with the language and allow it to be a little more flexible.

This is not on the floor yet, but when we talk about the copyright bill, Bill C-32, which is on the order paper and hopefully will come up for debate pretty soon, we are looking at ways in which the context of digital technology is changing the way we act as legislators. Flexibility is required. Mr. Speaker, I am sure you will agree with me that in the context of flexibility, the legislation has to be devised and written so that it can be enforced in a way that gives people protection and preserves their rights but at the same time goes after the people out to do nefarious things, in other words, circumvent laws, whether it be about copyright and digital locks in Bill C-32 or, in this particular case, getting around the consent for people to receive this information. Sometimes these people are very deceptive. They pretend to be what they are not. They shroud themselves in a realm of legitimacy.

Whether they call themselves a bank or a financial institution, they parade themselves as such and become a part of a person's life or know they can get involved in a person's life by pretending to be something that has a great reputation. With the imagination of using emails, Facebook and messaging, they have ways of doing this. It seems there are advances every day in the criminality of this type of activity. So we have to look at that.

The other issue we have to look at, of course, is digital technology itself and how it proliferates in a short period of time. When we first tackled the issue in the House, we looked at it through a panel. We set up a panel to decide how we were going to deal with all the spam email. Billions of dollars every year are spent on trying to cut down on spam email. It now constitutes the majority of traffic around the world when it comes to e-commerce and emailing in general, for that matter.

We can well imagine that back then, as it was becoming a problem, we set up a panel. That was in 2004 and 2005 when we were primarily looking at emails. There was just that one form of communication that we were focused on. Since then, we have text messages and Facebook, which was not looked at in 2004-05 as it is a relatively new concept, and other modes of communication such as texting.

Right now, Mr. Speaker, I can take a picture of you and send it around the world. How about that?

[Mike Allen]

That would be scary.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Your colleagues are picking on you, Mr. Speaker, but I will stick up for you and say that would be a fine shot, indeed, to send around the world.

Even in 2004 or 2005, we never thought we could take a picture and send it instantaneously. People can ask, “Where are you now”, and I can respond that I am in Newfoundland. They can ask me what it looks like and I can say, “It looks like this”, and send it. It is incredible.

However, that open opportunity for communications, which leads to an open opportunity for business for people seeking gainful employment, also opens us up to a realm of criminality. We can only assume that the criminal element out there is just as imaginative as the people who make a lot of money doing it the right way.

That brings me to Bill C-28. When it comes to prohibiting the sending of spam without the prior consent of recipients, that is the key. There is an element of consent with this and that way the element of criminality gets taken out of it because people will not be able to do it, but then we get into the issue of enforcement, which I will get to later.

Bill C-28 introduces legislation to enact all recommendations, and the recommendations prohibit the sending of spam without the prior consent of recipients, the use of false or misleading statements that disguise the origins or true intent of the email, which is very true as I mentioned earlier, and the installation of unauthorized programs, which I will talk about. That is the concept of spyware or malware that was talked about, these sorts of things. They are like little bugs that crawl through either the air or wire, gain access and do funny things to computers while people sleep or are doing something else.

The unauthorized collection of personal information or email addresses is the same type of principle. It infiltrates people's computers and all the material stored on hard drives or whatever devices they have to store memory. Not only can that information be taken but it can be manipulated and sent elsewhere and an all-out assault done on other computers around the world. It is quite fascinating how people have manipulated the system of instant communication over the past four or five years.

Bill C-28 introduces legislation to enact all the recommendations that I stated. Many flaws were exposed in the last bill and there was quite a bit of feedback from people who said that things needed to be fixed, some of it major and some minor, that sort of thing. A lot of it was minor. When prorogation happened, elements of what happened in the industry committee at that point, as well as sending the bill back to the House, because of course when prorogation happens, the bill dies and the bill is brought back to the House.... Some of the changes were incorporated into the bill at that time.

God forbid that I praise prorogation for the sake of making one bill better than the other or a new and improved bill. Nonetheless, there were a few changes made to it that have satisfied many people in this debate, which is a good thing.

The other point is that, as we monitor the legislation going through, we will realize then whether these changes were appropriate or not as we get to the regulations when, because of this legislation, it triggers Governor in Council or cabinet to make the regulations involved.

I mentioned earlier the 2004-2005 task force set up by the government of the day, which decided to have a good look at this particular situation. It hired 10 people involved in this and it received thousands and thousands of items of input from stakeholders around the world, not just in Canada. The recommendations came forward that involved themes of consent and involved themes of doing specific tasks in order to specifically go after people who were up to no good.

One of the issues we came in contact with in the four years since is that we have to realize that the technology has changed. Therefore the flexibility we need in this bill has been addressed to a certain degree, but I am sure the committee will have a closer look at that as well.

Just so that you know, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure you are aware of it, 60% to 80% of all email traffic around the world is spam. Of course, I am not talking about everyone's favourite lunch meat. I am talking about spam of a type that one does not want to get each and every day. They are selling everything. Some of the stuff I dare not repeat in the House, for fear of the wrath of you, Mr. Speaker, and others. But members can well imagine what I am talking about, soliciting money, soliciting a product that does not measure up, as it were.

The sheer volume of messages poses a challenge not just to the individual owner of a particular computer or a bank of computers, for that matter, but to Internet service providers or ISPs, as we like to call them, legitimate businesses that conduct their activities over the Internet and email and, most importantly, consumers.

Let me just stay with that first point, businesses. There are so many businesses now that rely upon the Internet and the two-way communication between some consumer and themselves that the presence of all this spam material basically erodes the revenue stream for them, and that is a huge issue. If we do not address that, then many small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs, will suffer and continue to suffer.

I personally know some businesses that are spending thousands of dollars each month for software to get rid of the spam. These are people who cannot afford this cost but most of their business models, vis-à-vis direct marketing, go through the Internet because we have become global in scale.

Look at the tourism ads from Newfoundland and Labrador, where I come from. We get an incredible amount of response from across this country about those new ads that we see about Newfoundland and Labrador, but for a lot of these smaller businesses some of it is spam and some of it is legitimate.

As the House knows, I come from an area that relies a lot on the seal harvest every year. Many tourism operators get a lot of junk mail, spam, things to take them down, from animal rights groups not just in North America but around the world. They are using these techniques to go after these small businesses.

This is the type of activity we are into where we need to cut down on this. If it is a legitimate form of protest, such an email from one individual to a business saying that he or she does not like a product or that he or she does not like the way the business thinks about a certain issue and therefore will not frequent the business, I understand. However, people use these methods,which are put out by spam in certain cases, and they try to block their own computer data banks. We are talking about a small or medium-sized enterprise.

One can well imagine that these protest groups with larger amounts of money can actually gum up the system, as it were, very easily. Hopefully, some of this legislation will cut down on that. At least I feel it will.

Spam is also a large component of computer viruses. The seal harvest issue is a good example because there were a couple of examples of that happening. One of the ways of doing this is by using phishing programs, not “fishing” as in f-i-s-h-i-n-g, but p-h-i-s-h-i-n-g, which is designed for identity theft.

Identity theft is a huge issue with underworld crime. One of the ways identity theft occurs is through the use of spyware, for example, which can grab information from our computer and, from our computer, it goes out to other computers and gets that same sort of information and racks up our credit cards or whatever they may be. Therein lies a situation that we need to deal with on a global scale.

That brings me to one of my final points, which is the international scope of this.

Even though we are here debating, we vote to send this to a committee, I assume it comes back with some minor changes and it becomes law rather quickly. Once that is done, it is incumbent upon us, not just members of the cabinet and not just the Prime Minister but all of us as parliamentarians, to engage in all international fora that are out there, whether it be through the European Union, the Council of Europe, or through Southeast Asia. We need to engage all mechanisms, including the United Nations, because it will take a massive global effort to cut down on the amount of junk mail spam and the illegal activity associated with it.

By doing that, it will be an incredible step forward. If we are the final G8 nation to sign up for this, then the G8 should be the leading role for the rest of the nations, whether it is Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and all the other nations where the proliferation of electronic media is so great. Again, that is what was not covered in 2004 and 2005. Who thought of facebook back then? Not very many people. However, now we have facebook, which is an incredible communicator for photos, family issues and a big one for business as well. It is a huge issue.

When it comes to enforcement, this is only a small part of this battle. The enforcement of these laws, followed by the regulations, will take a concerted effort, not just by the CRTC, which is handling this primarily, and not just the Competition Bureau, but other aspects of society, including all law officers, that this is a serious issue because we need to elevate the awareness of it. What people are doing through things such as spam is so illegal that a lot of people look at these things and do not pay much attention to them. However, some of them are very dangerous to us, to our finances and to small business owners. The enforcement part of this bill, Bill C-28, will take a massive effort.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as the member knows, I am concerned that we have waited so long. As a matter of fact, Bill C-28 was introduced in the House on May 25 and we had the first round of debate on September 27. Here we are now, about a month later, and we are continuing on with that debate at second reading. It is an indication of how the process is being dragged out by the government on important legislation such as this. However, the member laid out some interesting points.

I was looking at the bill in a little more detail and at the regulatory requirements. When we pass legislation at all stages it goes through the whole process, but there is one thing we have not seen with regard to the bill and that is regulations. The regulations are important and can have a significant bearing on either the interpretation of the application of the legislation or in terms of the impacts that we should assess as legislators. I wonder if the member would agree that maybe the government should consider presenting draft regulations to the committee before the committee completes its work.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, when we dealt with the Fisheries Act, it was the same sort of thing. One of the things we wanted to get to was to bring some recommended regulations into the process. The member makes a very good point.

In the final part of my speech I mentioned that enforcement could go a long way toward fleshing out the type of enforcement that we need. It also would give a greater signal to the rest of the world just what it is that we are measuring up to and that we should come together as a global force on this particular one. As the member and other members have mentioned in the House, we are talking about a massive global effort to put this out there. If people were up to no good, they could do it on a global scale just like that. In a snap of a finger, people could go global in any nefarious activity.

I commend what the hon. member just suggested. I had not thought of it before but he has a valid point.

[Glenn Thibeault, NDP, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my hon. colleague for a great speech on this subject. It is something we all seem to agree that we need to address.

One of the things I asked previously, which the member spoke about at the beginning of his speech, was on the vulnerable, the seniors, who are not necessarily so astute with new technology but are using it and are coming into this.

The member talked about how quickly something could go global. If 100,000 or even one million spam emails are going out there, even if just 1% of those people are responding and actually being affected by this by paying with their credit cards, then we need to do our due diligence to ensure we protect all of our citizens.

Do we feel that this bill goes far enough? Do we see anything else we could do to ensure that we are protecting seniors and anyone else who would be affected by spam?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, that is a fantastic point and one I did not illustrate in my speech.

We need to go back to the scenario that my hon. colleague from Sudbury painted. Let us look at the situation of a senior or anyone else who is unfamiliar with the electronic age. They do not or have never used email. They then decide to get in touch with one of their loved ones living far away through facebook, or whatever method, by sending pictures. They get an email with an attachment of a picture. What if they get spam email that is disguised as coming from a bank? Naturally, anybody who is not familiar with how spam works and how these junk emails work will look at it as legitimate, and it will ask for information. If our bank asks for information, we will give it because the trust is implicit.

Some of the material in the bill talks about an implied consent. That is the one point that causes me some trouble about this bill. I think we should probably tidy up some of the language around implied consent. I am not a legal expert and I do not know the magic bullet but we really need to understand implied consent here because Implied consent implies that we know exactly what we are receiving but we may not know that we are being deceived or that something is not right.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to touch on one other area that the member spoke about, which is quite important, and that is the aspect of public education.

As a past chair of the access to information, privacy and ethics committee, we have reviewed the Privacy Act and PIPEDA. In fact, PIPEDA is up for another legislative review. I raise this because the Privacy Commissioner has encouraged and basically pleaded with the government, particularly with the Minister of Justice who is responsible for those bills, to provide for a public education mandate and to provide the funding.

The response of the government has been that it is somewhat implicit. However, being implicit does not help because it does not involve more funding for the Privacy Commissioner to be able to do the job. This is the same problem with passing legislation that affects the Criminal Code. We can make the offences greater and ask for more enforceability but if we do not give the resources to the policing authorities to be able to enforce those laws, what good are the laws?

I would ask the member to comment on the public education mandate. He might want to amplify on how important it is that we are all part of the solution.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I remember several years ago in my former career talking about the piracy of satellite signals. In other words, for a while we were into a grey area called the grey market for satellite dishes. Some were Canadian and some were American but no one really knew if they were illegal. People went through a period of not knowing if it was illegal so they just bought them. Legislators and enforcement did not know.

We then passed laws and satellite dishes were either black or white. There was no longer any grey matter. They were either illegal or not. However, the emphasis was on the education. A lot of people had illegal satellite dishes and were not aware of it. They just did not know it was illegal. They had bought them prior to the law coming in. It took a public campaign by the satellite providers, the cable companies, the TV networks and their associations to let people know that certain dishes were illegal.

I only bring that up as an illustration because it was an important aspect for piracy of satellite signals. Most of us now know what is illegal and what is not. It was a very important campaign, and I suspect that after this, following regulations, following this legislation being passed, through the resources available through the Privacy Commissioner's office, the CRTC, the Competition Bureau and all stakeholders involved in this issue, we should be engaged fully to fully engage the public as to what to look out for.

I compliment the organizations like Crime Stoppers and PhoneBusters that do a fantastic job elevating the amount of awareness needed for people who are inundated with bad phone calls, spam emails and the like.

[Glenn Thibeault, NDP, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Ottawa Centre.

I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-28, Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act. The bill is an updated version of Bill C-27, which incorporates items that were added as government amendments during its original passage through the House in 2005.

It is fair to say that ordinary individuals are being overly inundated with unwanted spam in their email inboxes on a daily basis. Spam currently accounts for more than 80% of global email traffic and around 90% of Canadian email traffic. In addition to the nuisance that spam poses, as well as the decreased productivity and efficiency which spam entails, spam can also pose a significant risk to individuals who unwittingly open maliciously infected emails. Thus the issue of spam is not solely connected to economic and individual efficiency on productivity, but also to the increased rate of identity theft and other forms of illegal activity, which has grown alongside the rapid increase in the online shopping industry during the beginning of the 21st century.

What is spam? Spam is identified as the abuse of electronic messaging systems, including most broadcast media digital delivery systems, to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email, the term applies to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging, Usenet newsgroups, web search engines, spam, spam in blogs, WikiSpam, online classified ad spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions and file sharing networks. This is not a Monty Python skit, it is actually a very serious issue.

Spam seems to infiltrate every aspect of our lives these days and it is extremely important for the Canadian government and Parliament to take this on.

Let us look at the legislative summary for this. It says that this is an act that is an accumulation of a process that began with anti-spam action planned for Canada launched by the government in 2004, which established a private sector task force, chaired by Industry Canada, to examine the issue of unsolicited commercial email or spam. By the end of 2004, spam, which is in many ways the electronic equivalent to junk mail, has grown to encompass 80% of all global email traffic.

That was 2004 and here we are in 2010 and we are once again debating legislation. The initial legislation was lost when the House was prorogued. We have again lost time dealing with an issue that is extremely important to businesses, consumers and ordinary citizens in our country. This is complex legislation. It has many pages and it impacts on a number of different agencies.

However, let us look at some of the costs.

In both commercial and non-commercial cases, spam happens because of a positive cost benefit analysis result if the cost to recipients is excluded as an externality a spammer can avoid paying. The cost is the combination of overhead. The cost of the overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth developing or acquiring an email, wiki or a blog spam tool and taking over or acquiring a host or a zombie. The transaction cost is the incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed multiplied by the number of recipients, the risks, the chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages. Then there is the impact on the community and/or the communications channel being spammed.

The benefit is the total expected profit from spam, which may include any combination of the commercial or non-commercial reasons listed above. If we talk about how quickly this can become a global epidemic, so to speak, we could have millions of emails go out asking for credit card information and just a small percentage of that is returned as a huge benefit, negatively of course, but it is still a benefit.

We are starting to see spam now used in crime. It can be used to spread computer viruses, Trojan horses, or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft or advanced fee fraud. Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed, while others attempt to use victims inexperienced with computer technology to trick them, such as phishing.

In May 2007 one of the world's most prolific spammers, Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested by U.S. authorities. Described as one of the top 10 spammers in the world, Soloway was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, email fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Prosecutors alleged that he used millions of zombie computers to distribute spam during 2003. This was the first case at that time in which U.S. prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain.

We have been labelled, unfortunately, as a lawless spam haven. Canada is the only G8 country without anti-spam legislation. It is only a matter of time before spammers will begin to take advantage of this. Canada ranked fifth worldwide as a source of web-based email spam, trailing only Iran, Nigeria, Kenya and Israel. This information is from a research study done by Cloudmark, a leading provider of anti-spam software.

A recent Facebook case has placed the spotlight on Canada's ongoing failure to address its spam problem by introducing long overdue anti-spam legislation. The Facebook case is only the latest illustration of the impact of government inaction.

Companies anxious to target Canadian-based spammers have been forced to turn to other countries to do the job, while international law enforcement investigations into criminal spam activities run the risk of stalling as Canada's authorities may lack the requisite investigatory powers.

The fact that organizations are forced to use U.S. courts and laws to deal with Canadian spammers points to an inconvenient truth; that Canadian anti-spam laws are woefully inadequate and that we are rapidly emerging as a haven for spammers eager to exploit the weak legal framework.

My colleague earlier talked about the OPP PhoneBusters and the great work it was doing to protect seniors and any person being dealt with fraudulently. Part of this group is based out of North Bay, Ontario. Many times PhoneBusters has put out announcements in my great riding of Sudbury, advising seniors to watch for an email campaign coming from some country that is asking for their credit card information. We are going in the right direction if we are able to start protecting our seniors and those who are infrequent users of electronic media.

Canada initially recognized the need to address spam with the formation of a task force in 2004, which included a broad cross-section of marketers, telecom companies and public policy groups. The task force unanimously recommended that the government introduce anti-spam legislation.

There are some very important aspects in this bill.

Under commercial activity, the bill contains a new exemption where it explicitly does not include any transaction, act or conduct carried out for the purpose of law enforcement, public safety, the protection of Canada in the conduct of international affairs or the defence of Canada.

The electronic address covers email, instant messaging, text messaging and messages sent on Facebook and Twitter. These things did not exist five years ago, and we have seen technology evolve rapidly. We will ensure that we can capture all aspects of spam by using that language.

The electronic message includes a message sent over any means of telecommunication, including text, sound, voice or image and therefore implicates voicemail messages. The commercial electronic message is based on the type of content contained in it, including contained links. Thus, for commercial purposes in any way, it qualifies under this definition.

Telecommunications service extends to any service or feature of a service provided by means of telecom facilities. Transmission data is any data relating to the telecommunications function of dialing, routing, addressing or signalling, including by phone, Internet and wireless involved in all functions of transmitting data electronically outside the actual substance of the message.

This is a very complex issue. We talk about many avenues and ways in which those with not so positive ideas can get their way out.

It is clear that introducing anti-spam legislation is intricate for both Canadians and Canada more broadly. I am glad to support the bill.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the more we talk about the bill, the more we understand why it was so important that it be dealt with in the last session before the House prorogued and why it should have gone to committee before second reading.

Looking at the regulations that are required, one of the things is defining personal or family relationships. If the person communicating with us is a personal or family relation, he or she is going to have to define it. It really is quite strange. It does not apply to certain classes or circumstances, as per the regulations. What are they? What is the scope of this? One that was really interesting was if a computer program was installed and performed any other function specified in the regulations other than what we thought it would do.

It is going to be very interesting for members to look at this legislation in the light of regulations, which we will not see until it gets royal assent and after the order-in-council develops them. Does the member share my concern about the regulations and does he have any experience with regard to how long it really takes for regulations to be drafted, promulgated and in fact enacted?

[Glenn Thibeault, NDP, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the important thing is that when we are sending this to committee, we need to ensure we are putting things in place to protect families.

The member mentioned families. I know families are starting to have computers throughout their houses and their kids and grandparents are using them. I can relate this to my father who, bless his soul, is turning 97 in January. We got him a computer and we installed programs. He goes online and reads his emails, but he does not understand the whole piece about how long it will be, where it will go and how it will be sent. His important thing is he needs to be able to communicate. He takes the email at face value.

Therefore, if we are looking at creating legislation, we need to look at all aspects to ensure we are protecting seniors and families. If it takes a month or three weeks, the important thing is to ensure we do it for the right reasons, which is to protect Canadians.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think you know the work my colleague has done on consumer protection for Canadians across the country, from coast to coast to coast.

My question for him is with regard to the enforcement of this, on the role of net providers and their role to help regulate this. We have seen net providers often be the ones who just grab the money and run. Spam is something that requires not just legislation, but coordination from net providers and to ensure that the cost is not pushed down to consumers.

My question for him is about the consumer protection on this, ensuring consumers are not the ones holding the bill for the legislation.

[Glenn Thibeault, NDP, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague brings up an important point. This needs to be a collaboration of the ISPs and of legislation and the whole telecommunication industry because we also know about junk faxes. There are many things we need to do to ensure that we are protecting all consumers when it comes to this file and to the bill.

If we talk about seniors or anyone who receives a fax, they could see that as legitimate. What we need to do is continue to work together with all aspects of the telecommunications industry to ensure we protect all consumers.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

A short question, the hon. member for Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor.