Yes, thank you.
For the example you used of a warranty or some form of communication relevant to a product, there are two possibilities. First of all, there could have been express consent when someone bought the product that they always wanted to have information on warranties, or anything related to the safety of a product, or anything along those lines. But even if not, the implied consent in an existing business relationship would work in that situation. The 18-month time limit is just a way of trying to find some date certainty regarding when that business contact is stale. But that's a detail that can be looked at.
If I could go back, Mr. Chairman, to the question about the spam task force and the work that was done, I'm pretty familiar with the thinking of the group, having been involved in the working groups and the task force itself. It's interesting that people like Tom Copeland, president of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers—whom the minister mentioned earlier had expressed support for the legislation—was a member of the spam task force. Most of those members would see the bill as very much consistent with the framework they had put in place. However, there are aspects of the bill that you would see in the work of the spam task force that we need to develop, such as defining the practices that will be part of the regime of implied consent. The regulations the minister referred to are going to be used to pick up some of the details we need in order to make the bill work effectively in a business environment.
Specifically, in the spam task force report, there was a piece of work done by the Canadian Marketing Association—the president, John Gustavson, who was another member of the task force. The CMA has come out in support of the bill. The annex I'm talking about was a set of industry guidelines for commercial e-mail marketing.
Our intention has always been that those guidelines developed by the spam task force, and later adopted by the Canadian Marketing Association, and endorsed by a number of Canadian businesses, would be reflected in the regulations and therefore in the operating principles of Bill C-27 when it became law.