Thank you very much.
Allow me to add my appreciation to each of you for having taken the time to come here today, but as importantly, for having taken the time to go very diligently through the legislation and give us some very good suggestions and recommendations.
My first comment has to do with the philosophy of the bill. I think all of us agree--I don't think there's a person who hasn't agreed--that this is a required piece of legislation, but there's a philosophy differential. I'm hearing especially in today's group two different schools of thought, as it were. There are those who think this should be a bill directed just towards what I'm going to call abusive communications, and there are those who really think that it should be very broad, that it should really talk about accountability of electronic communications. I think “accountability” is the word you used.
So there are two kinds of philosophies here, and I would like to talk about that for a moment, because I'm going to use an example. I think that in your submission you actually say that concerns are “largely unfounded”, yet we've heard concerns around the scope of the bill being too narrow, concerns around how clearer definitions are required, and concerns about what is not permitted. We've also heard implied versus express consent concerns. I can go on.
There are these two different philosophies. One is saying that we just need to fix the problems we're having with these abusive communications. Then there are those who say that we should decidedly keep it broad.
I'm going to go to the international community. As I understand it, the bill we currently have before us assumes that all electronic communications are basically unwanted spam, and it really prohibits commercial electronic messages. If I look at, for example, the U.S. legislation, it applies to e-mails that are sent in violation of an individual's opt-out request and are fraudulent, false, and misleading. If I look at Australia's, as I think my colleague mentioned, it applies to a defined list of commercial electronic messages that relate to direct marketing. The words “direct marketing” again show up in the Singapore spam act. Could each of you talk about this?
Perhaps we'll start with Mr. Fewer, because I think you were on the side of it being broader, and then perhaps Mr. Fraser and Mr. Lawford can talk about a philosophical view. What we don't want to do is penalize legitimate commercial communications here in this country. We don't want to have the situation where those outside of our country have access to people inside of our country with e-mails, access that we don't legitimately have.
Mr. Fewer, could you perhaps comment? And then we'll move on to others.