Thank you.
The one common denominator that has come out of work in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which started an examination of spam and other harmful activity on the Internet a few years ago, was that you need a combination of tools, legal and technical, to deal with spam. I think that's the first lesson.
The legislative side of it, which I think has been recognized in the work that we've been doing on spam, is one of the important pieces of that toolkit approach that we need. I think you'll find that every country that has a successful result from their work on spam--for example, Australia--has a toolkit approach. In fact, Australia, like Canada, talked about toolkits at the same time the OECD promoted that particular approach.
Australia has taken an approach towards spam that, like this bill, is based on the concept of consent. As I mentioned before, they have looked at it as a domestic regime that has to work in combination with international arrangements to deal with spamming. Another similarity to Bill C-27 is that the Australians do use their communications regulator as well to deal with some aspects of spam.
Interestingly, Australia is a country that formally reviewed its anti-spam legislation in 2006 after about three years in operation. They found out from the data that because of the legislative arrangements they put in place, they had reduced Australia's contribution, if I can use that word, to global spam to something that was well down in the list. It was off the top 20 list of spam-originating countries. I think that's a good example of how that toolkit approach has been effective in that one country.
