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 have a quick question for my hon. colleague who gave us some great illustrations. We have received many great illustrations today from people with examples of just exactly what it is we are dealing with. I would like to ask the member about the idea of enforcement and how we can get involved.

One of the issues the member talked about was the foreign influence and the offshore influence for many of our young people and our seniors who are the most vulnerable in society. Would the member be the one to encourage our nation, once this is adopted and regulations are put in place, and that we should engage the rest of the world on this? How do we go about doing this? Being the last country of the G8, what are some of the countries that should be brought into this discussion and engaged in the matter of spam emails?

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the world is getting smaller. It is becoming an island. We are connected through the Internet. We can actually go on the Internet and speak to someone in China, India and other faraway lands.

It is important that we take the lead. We in Canada have the resources, the intelligence, the educated staff and people like RIM, for example. We need to take on that role.

Which countries should we engage? Another hon. colleague whispered Nigeria. We need to get countries like China and India onboard because those are the countries where our subcontractors are going.

I hope we do take the lead and that we move forward very quickly on international cohesion.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when we think about what we are trying to achieve here, certainly the international requirements make it problematic. I wish I had all of the legislation from the other G8 countries and the comparatives to find out whether or not we have covered them all.

I still think that one of the most important progressive things that we could to is to promote the public education part of the equation. I do not know how many members here have ever read the licensing agreement when they install or download a piece of software and fully appreciate it. It is like reading an insurance document with the small letters.

This seems so fundamental to me and yet I do not see, in terms of the government's approach, that commitment to a public education mandate for the Privacy Commissioner so that we as Canadians can be part of the solution to protect our privacy.

The member may want to comment.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when we looked at the financial crisis, for example, we realized that the problem was financial illiteracy. In a similar way, the Internet has been given to us and everybody accesses it without reading the licences. It becomes too cumbersome and we think nobody is taking us for a ride. However, it is in the fine print that we have a problem.

It brings in a very important point. We should have Internet usage literacy which would allow us to understand what we are downloading, The government should implement that education when the committee is looking at the issues around literacy.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be speaking about Bill C-28, Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act. The word “wireless” is important, as we will see later on, given that there are important developments in that area, particularly with 3G, which is becoming more significant.

The Bloc Québécois is in favour of the principle of Bill C-28, which was previously Bill C-27 but died on the Order Paper at prorogation. It is important to note that the government is dragging its heels on this file and is taking as long as possible to deal with this problem. However, this new legislation, with a few small amendments, specifically targets unsolicited commercial electronic messages. This bill has been needed and requested by society as a whole for a long time now. Governments, Internet service providers—which I will refer to later as ISPs—network operators and consumers are all affected by the problem of spam.

In this type of bill, it is important to define the terms. What is meant by the term “spam”? Spam can be defined as a commercial electronic message sent without the express consent of the recipient. It can be any text, audio, voice or visual message sent by any means of telecommunication, including email, cellular phone text messaging or instant messaging, whose content is such that it is reasonable to conclude that the purpose of the message is to encourage participation in commercial activity. Any electronic message that offers to purchase, sell, barter or lease a product, goods, services, land or an interest or right in land, or a business, investment or gaming opportunity is considered spam for our purposes.

Note that the following types of commercial messages are not considered as spam: messages sent by an individual to another individual with whom they have a personal or family relationship; messages sent to a person who is engaged in a commercial activity and consist solely of an inquiry or application related to that activity; messages that are, in whole or in part, an interactive two-way voice communication between individuals; and messages that are sent by means of a facsimile to a telephone account. This bill does not include them, but we know that faxes can also be a form of spam. Messages that are voice recordings sent to a telephone account are not spam. Earlier, I mentioned 3G technology, which goes through cell phone towers and is becoming increasingly significant.

We must create safeguards for legitimate electronic commerce. It is now essential to our economy. Not only are commercial emails sent with the prior and ongoing consent of the recipient important to electronic commerce, but they are also essential to the development of the online economy. It is quite clear that our commerce is heading in that direction.

The Bloc Québécois is pleased to see that Bill C-28 takes into account most of the recommendations in the final report of the task force on spam.

I would remind this House that the task force on spam was made up of people from government, industry and consumer advocacy groups. So it was a very broad task force whose members reached a consensus after a few months of work. They tabled their report in 2005. This bill has been on the table for a long time. In 2005, the multipartite task force tabled the bill that the government more or less adopted as its own. It was the task force that essentially came up with this bill.

We are very upset that the legislative process has taken so long. The legislation was tabled in 2005, and it is now 2010. Parliament may have been prorogued, but we are not sure the government really intends to deal with this bill quickly. It is quite likely that the bill will be delayed further, because it is hard to know whose interests will be served, so the government does not want to rush this bill through.

The committee study will be an opportunity for many industry stakeholders to come back and update it and for consumer advocacy groups to have their say about the new Electronic Commerce Protection Act. It is a question of updating it—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

I am sorry, but I have to interrupt the hon. member. He will have 13 minutes remaining when the House resumes consideration of this bill.

Statements by members. The hon. member for Abbotsford.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-28, 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, be read the second time and sent to a committee.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

Before question period, the hon. member for Brome—Missisquoi had the floor. He still has 13 minutes left to conclude his remarks. The hon. member for Brome—Missisquoi.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I was saying in regard to Bill C-28 that there is a lot of spam and I defined what spam is. I have the pleasure now of putting all that in the current context because intrusions into people's private lives are nothing new. Companies and corporations tried for decades to sell their products through publications people received in the mail. That was an intrusion into our private lives but a fairly minor one in comparison with the spam we receive directly on our home computers. First of all, intrusive junk mail could be eliminated because there were ways of doing that and second, it amounted to only a small fraction of the mail we received, while the amount of spam we get can sometimes exceed the number of legitimate e-mails on our home computers.

Things certainly change over time. Back in the days when there were only postal deliveries, concern about intrusions into our private lives focused almost exclusively on government intrusions. We all remember such great novels as George Orwell’s 1984 and other similar works. Nowadays, intrusions come much more from the business world. This is a new threat. I did not say that the fear of government intrusion has disappeared, but it is just one of a number of possible intrusions into our private lives. There are some recent developments, such as Facebook. Concern about intrusions into our private lives is now greater than the fear of government intrusion. We are afraid of intrusions by our neighbours, friends, relatives and family. They can get right into our private lives. That shows just how fast things are changing.

And then there is the task force that I mentioned earlier. This task force was struck in 2004 and presented its report in 2005. A lot has changed since 2005, which is why I feel that the committee must work openly with a view to improving this bill. That type of openness is rarely found in legislation. We get the impression that this legislation will already be practically outdated if it is not updated. It is very important to keep in mind that computer usage evolves rapidly so that the legislation can be relevant and valid.

And coming back to that task force, it brought together Internet service providers—not just companies—electronic marketing experts, and government and consumer representatives. It was a broad-based group of people in the know. More than 60 groups from the sectors concerned took part and did an admirable job. I want to emphasize that. But this work absolutely must be put into the 2010-11 context because this evolution needs to be taken seriously.

In addition to the online anti-spam awareness campaign launched to provide users with tips on how to limit the amount of spam they receive, it should be mentioned that the task force on spam presented its final report to the Minister of Industry in May 2005.

The report was entitled Stopping Spam: Creating a Stronger, Safer Internet.

We need to create a stronger, safer Internet because it has become a vitally important economic tool. Simply prohibiting all economic communications and marketing through email is out of the question, because that would limit the freedom of those who want to receive such material. The bill must allow people to continue receiving emails of this nature if they so desire. People must be able to receive communications from a company or group of companies that they have clearly identified.

Consider for example the paper catalogues people receive. Personally, I have quite a bit of experience as a handyman. I receive very specialized catalogues in woodworking, which is a real passion of mine. When people receive them electronically, it means the companies have our permission to send them and solicit our business in that way. That is why we cannot simply eliminate all forms of commercial correspondence on the Internet. This legislation will be difficult to create and enforce. Consider the example of Facebook. People trusted it and posted things without thinking about the fact that neighbours and family could see into their private lives.

Using the same kind of procedures and programs on the computer, people could find ways around this legislation if it were too simple or simplistic. This legislation will have to be fine-tuned. That is why it is crucial that all the recommendations made in the report are included, even if they need to be tweaked later.

One of the recommendations had to do with proposed legislation and more vigorous enforcement measures. The report recommended drafting legislation to prohibit spam and to safeguard personal information and privacy as well as email, networks and computers, which, of course, can be made to crash.

The legislation is designed to allow individuals and companies to sue spammers. This applies not only to products, but also to services that people promote. Some might argue that people promote and advertise things on television and that this comes into our homes. That is true, but we can all choose not to watch television. If the Chamber of Notaries runs an ad to promote the need for notaries, then we just have to click a button if we do not want to see it. However, if we receive 10 or 15 pop-up ads that we cannot avoid and that take up space to announce that the Chamber of Notaries is the best in the world and that it is absolutely necessary, we might find that to be an invasion of privacy, and rightfully so.

The task force also recommended the creation of a centre of expertise on spam. The centre would coordinate the government's anti-spam initiatives. A new agency will have to be created. The centre would be responsible for coordinating policies, awareness campaigns and providing support to enforcement agencies. It would also receive complaints and compile statistics on spam.

It will be important to have a place where complaints could be lodged. Not all people who receive spam are capable of going after the company directly. The government will have to keep a record of the companies that send this type of message and take action directly.

The public awareness campaign I just mentioned is an interesting aspect. I do not think we could implement a modern or new law—spam has not been around for that long—without conducting a broad public awareness campaign. This campaign would also help businesses. There are small businesses that do not know and would not know that they cannot solicit business by email without running into problems. Awareness has to be raised on different levels. The campaign will have to address businesses that sell goods and services as well as the users. There are all sorts of users, including young children. Quite often, children aged 10 or 11 already have a laptop; if not a laptop, then an iPad or some other electronic gadget of that kind. They, too, can be inundated with email. We can see how quickly this is all evolving.

When this bill is studied in committee, the members will have to consider what is likely to happen in the near future. Because things change so quickly, the committee will not be able to consider what is going to happen in 10 years, but it could at least consider what is going to happen in the next few years.

The task force on spam also recommended establishing solid best practices for the industry, and it will be important to show that the industry can put an end to misleading information.

Lastly, there will have to be international co-operation and improved enforcement measures that are known around the world. France is an example of this. It passed legislation in 2004, but I would caution the committee that we cannot do what France did, because 2004 was a long time ago. The United States is perhaps more advanced. We need to look at this in an international context, and our law has to dovetail with other countries' legislation.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague spoke very well on this issue.

We have already filled up a significant amount of time in this Parliament dealing with this issue, and yet the government felt that this was such an unnecessary bill that it allowed it to be flushed along with all of last year's legislation. We are the only country in the G8 without anti-spam legislation.

The government continues to play out petty personal vendettas in the House of Commons. It has taken important legislation that we are seen on the international stage as having and that we need to have, and it flushes it down the political loo. Then we have to go through this whole process again.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why he thinks it is that in this House of Commons, thanks to the government, it takes up to two years to debate something as simple and straightforward as spam. We should have had this bill done long ago, but we had to be prorogued to allow the government to escape whatever political heat it was feeling at the time.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question, which is almost the same as the one I asked a Conservative colleague this afternoon. I asked him why the government had taken so long to introduce this bill. Was it trying to dodge the issue? Are there business interests behind this, and is that why we are being kept in the dark about why we do not have a law like the one all the other G8 countries have passed, as my colleague said? Certainly there is something we are not being told. When the Conservatives do not do something, it is usually because a lobby is involved and economic interests are at stake.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured, as always, to rise in this august chamber and speak on behalf of the wonderful people of Timmins—James Bay who have sent me here to represent them.

I will say at the beginning that I have already spoken on this bill. I have already been through the entire rigmarole about this spam legislation and yet, like spam itself, it seems we never get anywhere with the government and its own legislation.

Last session we had a mere three bills actually get through the process. I do not think there has ever been such a pitiful output by any government in the history of this Parliament. Legislation that needs to be addressed is always deep-sixed for whatever are the needs of the PM's war room. In this case, all the work that was done on the anti-spam legislation had to be tossed aside and flushed so that the government could prorogue, because it was starting to feel heat about the Afghan detainees.

The government felt that people would not notice if it turned out the lights on the democratic institution of Canada. We know that the Canadian public was rightfully outraged at the government's decision to knock off work for three months in January and hope nobody would notice.

In doing that, millions of dollars in time spent in hearing testimony, in developing legislation and in debate was lost. So here we are again, dealing with the issue of spam.

I have watched the government for the last five years. It treats the House of Commons as a sideshow. The real work of the government is behind the scenes, in putting their buddies into key positions, in stripping and vandalizing the public institutions of Canada, like the long form census, and in stripping the tax codes so that its friends in big banks and big oil are getting massive breaks while we are going into deficit.

Whatever happens in this House, we have one crime bill after another that is waved out, and the government jumps up and down but it does not ever seem all that serious about actually coming through with anything. I think it is because there is a fundamental contempt for the important work of this House.

I think it is very clear when we see something like the anti-spam legislation. We are the only G8 country without anti-spam legislation. It would not be all that hard to move on it, and I think it would be very important to move on it.

We are not just talking about an inconvenience. We are not just talking about the fact that, on any given day, my personal email has all kinds of offers for Viagra and trips to the Cayman Islands and all kinds of dodgy email requests that I have to flush and erase.

We are talking about a new form of fraud that works on such sheer levels of numbers that they only need to have 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 respond. I am sure that back in the fax machine days, people used to receive the famous Nigerian 419 fraud letters. The frauds originally came out of Nigeria and are now centred in eastern Europe.

Back in the days when the old Nigerian 419 scam was being run, and I am sure everyone saw them, there would be a request from somebody trying to get money out of Sierra Leone, Nigeria or Serbia after the Bosnian war. The scammers would say they would transfer the money into an account set up by other people, and of course those people would have to put up a little bit of cash. That is when people got caught in the fraud.

The old 419 fraud actually took a little bit of effort, and it cost the fraudsters a fair amount of time. They had to work the fax machines. It was random, and it was not all that effective. However, the 419 frauds are internationally known as one of the largest international fraud schemes.

When that can be done through the Internet and when people can actually get control of third-party personal computers through spyware and then start multiplying the requests from hundreds to thousands to millions, a high return is not needed to actually have the phenomenal levels of fraud that are happening, because of the third-party control of computers that takes place. This needs to be dealt with.

I am not singling out senior citizens in particular, but I know a number of senior citizens who have been victims of Internet fraud. It is perhaps because they come from a time when there was more trust in how things were done. Now more bank frauds are taking place and people are sending emails with requests for credit card information, banking information. The Internet is a major source of fraud, so we should be moving ahead with this anti-spam legislation.

Anti-spam legislation should be seen as a part of a larger digital strategy. After four years, the Conservative government has started to learn these words. It says the words “digital strategy”, but when it comes to digital strategy, it is like the Commodore 64. It is not even in the game in terms of a digital strategy.

What would a digital strategy mean for a government that actually cared about moving forward on issues other than minimum sentences for furniture theft or whatever is the latest issue in the crazy crime agenda that it is trying to push?

We need a forward-looking government. The Conservatives have had five years to bring the WIPO treaty forward in the House, five years. That could have been done, and we would have set a number of international standards, for example, the “making available” right.

Canada would not be under pressure in terms of its copyright legislation if we had dealt with the WIPO treaty five years ago. We could have taken the time to institute a good consultation process on copyright. We had one copyright bill, which was widely ridiculed. It looked like a dog's breakfast when it was brought forward, and the Conservatives had to quickly retract it. Now we have another copyright bill. I would like to say I am hopeful, but I am not holding my breath as to whether the government is actually serious about coming through with a copyright bill before the next election. It will be problematic if they do not. There is a certain element of needing to be seen, on the international stage, to be actually taking this seriously.

If we were going to have a digital strategy dealing with the WIPO treaty, dealing with issues like digital locks and making sure not just that we are WIPO compliant but that we are not just foolhardy, the present government's plan with digital locks would actually lock down content unnecessarily and criminalize individuals who have legal rights. For example, librarians or blind people need to be able to access educational works through digital locks. They will be treated the same as an international counterfeiter under the Conservatives, not surprisingly of course because the Conservatives have a dumb-down approach on pretty much everything. A blind student will be treated the same as an international counterfeiter if he or she has to break a digital lock to access digital works.

The Conservatives do not get it on the issue of copyright. They do not get it on the fact that we should have had spam legislation already in the bag and moving forward.

We need a national broadband strategy. Every time the government gets 50 houses hooked onto fibre, government members get up and announce it as some kind of great success. When the Conservatives took office, Canada was the world leader. If we look at the FCC rankings for the OECD countries, Canada was a world leader in broadband penetration. We have fallen further and further behind in terms of cost, access and speed.

A riding like mine is the size of Great Britain. Right now large sections of my riding are still on dial-up. We might as well have crank phones. The government talks about a broadband strategy of 1.5 megabits per second. That is the Conservatives' idea of our being in the 21st century.

Under the labour government, Australia will hook up 93% of Australia. Australia is a good example because it, like Canada, has a small population spread out over a vast territory. Ninety-three per cent of Australia will be hooked up by fibre at a rate of 100 megabits a second. I would like members to think of our ability to compete at 1.5 megabits. The government might as well lock big cannonballs to our feet and tell us to start running. That is the Conservatives' idea of our competing, not to mention what we are going to be up against with Sweden, which is at gigabyte capacity. South Korea is the same.

Canada is being left behind because the Conservative government does not get it. The Conservatives do not want to get it. They believe, in their blind faith, that the free enterprise system will somehow do this for them.

As we have seen in the rural United States and as we are seeing now in Canada, unless we have a government partnership, there is no business case that can be made to hook up large rural regions. There will never be a business case. The only business case the government can make is to say that digital strategy is a national priority in terms of competition, in terms of cultural involvement, in terms of the fundamental civic rights of citizens in a digital age to be able to participate. That comes out of a government vision.

Australia, with the labour government, will hook up 93% at 100 megabits per second in national broadband and the other 7% will be hooked up by wireless so nobody will be left behind.

What we have right now is a government that is adrift, a government that has no plan, for example, for the digital transition in television.

If we look at how the United States government prepared for the transition for digital from analog to digital on television, it had a national plan. The government worked with its regions. It had advertisements. It had workshops in communities to prepare people.

We are about 10 months away from the big switch where the analog signals will go dead and we will switch over to digital. Have we seen anything from our august industry minister on this? Have we heard him say a word? Zero, nada. Perhaps if he spent a little less time running the pork barrel projects into his riding and a little more time on the need to have a national digital strategy, he would be prepared for the digital transition that is looming. Canada, quite frankly, will not meet that transition.

When the transition happens, at least 15% of the country will go black. People will start phoning the offices of members of Parliament saying that they cannot get their beloved Montreal Canadiens on Saturday night on television and they will want to know why. We will have to tell them that the government had years to prepare for the digital transition and did nothing. The Conservatives think this will magically be handled for them.

The other issue in terms of a broadband strategy and a digital strategy is the fact that as the analog signals are shut down for television and we move to digital, the analog spectrum, a very juicy chunk of cyber real estate, goes on the block to be sold. The analogue spectrum will be worth billions of dollars. Again, we would think a forward-looking government would consider this. It has a $56 billion in debt. It needs a national forward-looking plan not for next year or two years, but for the next 10 years. To finance that plan it could sell off the analogue spectrum, take those billions of dollars and commit them to a national broadband digital strategy. Then it could tell people that it was a forward-looking government.

We have not heard a peep from the current government about what it will do with the money. We have not heard how it will break up the analogue spectrum. Even the space between the various parts of the spectrum that used to be used for CTV, or CBC, or Canwest or the Quebec stations is valuable. We could put that to public use, for innovation, for new project ideas. We could reserve part of the analogue space that actually belongs to the people of Canada for innovation, for new ideas. There will be many new forms of communication that are on the verge of being discovered and having access to that spectrum band could put Canada in the lead, where we need to be. However, we are not seeing anything from the government on that.

We have to think about this. If the government had billions of dollars that should be spent to ensure Canada, rural Canada and northern Canada, could participate and compete against competitive countries that will go up to gigabyte-per-second download speeds, the analogue spectrum would be a great place to put that. However, what is the government going to do with that money? I have my own personal bets. I am not a gambling man and I am not offering to take anybody's money, but I think we would have to be quite the old backwoods route not to think what it is going to do with money. The government's forward-looking strategy could be to take the billions from the analogue spectrum and build prison cells.

The cost of building prisons under the government will be $270,000 per cell. The government does not even have people to put in them. It will just keep bringing up enough private members' bills to find new ways to arrest more Canadians to put them in prison.

We need a plan. Besides the government's ideological bizarre focus on blowing $10 billion on prisons at a time of the largest deficit in history, we have seen zero from the government in terms of a forward looking digital strategy.

I go back to the issue of spam. Spam should be a fairly straightforward issue to deal with. It is inconvenient. No one likes it except for the lobbyists who always talk to the government because hidden in spam is a lot of useless electronic sales ads that most of the Canadian public does not need. Nevertheless, even with the lobbyists, I am sure we could deal with the spam. The question is this. Where is the vision?

The government brought forward spam legislation. The House debated it. We went through the whole process and the government decided it was more convenient to take all that legislation, flush it down the political loo and suspend the democratic work of the House. It shut everything down and laid waste to its whole legislative agenda. It set the clock back to zero, which is not the first time it has done it. It is something that the government does on a regular basis. Whenever it seems to get bored with almost succeeding and actually getting something done, it seems to get restless.

The government cannot go forward, so it is stuck in the bills it has and it erases them all and it starts all over. We are now in October 2010 and we remain the only country without spam legislation.

I have been saying how the government does not like to move on anything unless it is part of its ideological agenda. It has no forward thinking vision in terms of copyright and balancing the needs in terms of an innovative agenda on issues like net neutrality, open source and open data, issues that could really excite the Canadian public to move forward.

In all fairness I have seen it move dramatically once or twice in terms of where its agenda is going usually in protecting the tar sands or protecting ideological hacks who are working and supporting the party.

At the Copenhagen conference back in December 2009, Canada was once again embarrassed on the international stage by our horrific standards on the environment. The government would say that it was a principled stand, just like I am sure Harold Ballard thought that the Leafs losing every year was a principled stand.

In the Copenhagen Conference there was a group called the “Yes Men”. The Yes Men are international political pranksters who set up a fake website. That fake website said that Canada would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 by 40% from 1990 levels and they would be down to 80% by the year 2050. Of course that was a total fraud. Canada was not going to do that. However, they were trying to make a political statement about the Conservative government's defence of the tar sands and how it embarrassed us politically.

The Canadian government moved against that website immediately. It went after the ISP in another jurisdiction and it ended up shutting down 4,500 websites because the government did not want to be challenged internationally on the tar sands. I think even red China would be awe struck by the willingness of the government to shut down democratic sites because it does not like what they have to say.

The government will do nothing about the fact that we have international fraudsters on the spam, but it will shut down democratic websites. The government has failed again and it will continue to fail on the international innovative agenda.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member hit a very solid topic in dealing with the lack of the broadband strategy from the government.

I note that the violations are not criminal offences under the bill. Recently we had a situation where Facebook had a judgment against a Canadian spammer for I believe $1 billion. All the spammer did was declare bankruptcy and got out of the problem.

If we pass bills like this that simply offer a fine, in essence, and if the spammer simply declares bankruptcy, then what have we really accomplished? Perhaps a threat of jail time might have a better effect in forcing spammers to pay attention. I only say that on the basis of what happened recently with that court case.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague raises an excellent point. Again, when we are dealing with spam, we are not just dealing with irritating emails we have to spend a lot of time flushing. The fact it does intervene and impedes competitiveness and the ability of businesses to work, it has also become very much tied to cases of international fraud on a massive scale through the use of phishing to the taking over of third party computers.

If we do not have some real and clear punishments for shutting down spam sites, then Canada will continue to be seen as a spam haven. Under the Conservative government, any spam artist in the world knows that the worst he or she will get is a slap on the wrist and a peck on the cheek. The government is more willing to go after 15-year-old punks in Winnipeg and other cities, but international spammers seem to be welcome. The government does not seem to get it when it comes to the importance of dealing with spam and sending a message to spam artists.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague enlightened a number of us in regard to this situation. I was quite taken with his discussion in regard to the democratic protest by the group protesting the tar sands. It reminded me of the government shutting down people like Pat Stogran, the ombudsman for veterans, and Richard Colvin who wanted justice and blew the whistle in regard to Afghan detainees.

I think about democracy and the peril that democracy has faced with the government. Could the member comment on the impact of those 4,500 legitimate websites that were closed down and what does that say about the state of our democracy?