Absolutely.
With apologies to the Bard of Avon, friends, parliamentarians, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise CASL, not to kill it. The evil that critics of CASL do lives with them; the good is oft imbued in its sections; so let it be with CASL.
CASL's noble adversaries may tell you the law is too ambitious, as if this was a grievous fault.
CASL enshrines the work of the 2005 federal task force on spam. Best practices found in our final report are now global industry standards, but best practices mean nothing without disincentives to bad actors.
CASL is a crowdsourced law, taking input from hundreds of people working tens of thousands of hours. The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, for example, MAAWG, is an industry association of 185 member companies, all anti-spam professionals, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bell Canada. MAAWG participated throughout the CASL process and sent a letter to the Prime Minister urging the passage of the law as it was tabled.
My name is Neil Schwartzman. I'm the executive director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. I wrote the world's first distributed spam filter, and 20 years later, here we are. I'm a management consultant. My clients include the world's largest company and the world's biggest sender of commercial email, neither of which spam. It's not that hard. I also teach cyber-investigation methods to international law enforcement.
Spam filtering costs recipient networks $20 billion a year. We pay for spam. Spam has become much worse of late: ransomware and phishing payloads are vicious. Ninety per cent of the spam that hits our networks is affiliate spam, which you've heard we should allow. Affiliate spam is an open sewer spraying a billion messages per hour at our families, friends, and colleagues. Unsolicited junk email, texts, and phone calls from Walmart, DirecTV, and Fidelity are some of the affiliate spam sent by third parties, earning commissions from the brand to send spam. CASL was purpose-built to remedy such activity.
The Privacy Commissioner and other law enforcement agencies just this year have completed a five-country sweep against affiliate spammers. Results have yet to be published, but we will be hearing about that. Studies from Cloudmark, Inbox Marketer, Return Path, and Cisco have proven CASL to reduce spam coming into Canada and going out of it. That's data, not opinion.
Law enforcement can't possibly investigate, nor do they know about all of the spam attacks. CASL's PRA, a right integral to the American CAN-SPAM Act, has been suspended, lamentably preventing Canadian ISPs, businesses, and organizations from seeking compensation for damages done to their network by spam.
Declarations of CASL's damaging effects that some have made here are laughable. The OECD two weeks ago projected that Canada's economic growth for 2018 is the best in the G7. Quebec is enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in three decades. Our economy is not hurting. We hear about how legitimate companies have been caught in the CASL net. In two cases prosecuted by the CRTC, the marketing departments of Rogers and Kellogg's used spam email lists provided to them by third party firms. Yes, legitimate companies bear costs to become compliant, just as when PIPEDA came into force.
Businesses must be vigilant. Data breaches occur daily. Business email compromise costs tens of millions of dollars. CASL defines modern standards of data integrity and permission that companies must maintain in the global economy. In the EU, the updated GDPR privacy law comes into effect in 2018. Failure to maintain parity with them will put us at a severe economic disadvantage.
Why are some afraid of CASL? It's because it's working. CASL is so frightening to spammers that they lobby Canada's law enforcement and legislators. American groups with direct ties to black-hat spam organizations will present you with information in the coming weeks. They've been invited here.
With this in mind, I exhort you to leave CASL intact. Adjust, yes, and clarify, doubtless, but do not come here to kill CASL. Do Caesar proud.
Thank you for inviting us here.