That was one of my talking points, that we were the last country in the G8 to adopt an anti-spam law. It's embarrassing that some would like to do away with the law. It's an excellent law, and it's one that is respected as the best in the world among my colleagues.
Absolutely it could do with some adjustments, but in terms of the GDPR which is coming into effect May 25, 2018, we are about to encounter a degree of onerousness in data integrity that the world hasn't seen before, and that's a good thing.
The GDPR builds on the European privacy directive, which has been around for about a decade, with no teeth, with no ability to take punitive action. The GDPR gives countries the ability to force companies back into compliance, to respect the individual's right to say no, to be forgotten, to be left alone by marketers, or to willingly give that data to them and enjoy the benefits.
One thing that's very important is that the difference from the junk mail or the bulk mail that ends up on your doorstep is the marketer pays to get it there. They pay Canada Post to bring it to you. They pay for the printing. They pay for everything. Spammers do not. The recipients end up paying for that.
I'll talk about a small company here in Ottawa: striker.ottawa.on.ca was their domain. It's a consulting company that, for some reason, ended up on the spammer lists, and now they get one million spam a day. They've been driven out of business using that domain. There's not enough spam filtering in the world to compensate for that kind of flood.
We need to be a leader, and we are absolutely positioned to be such. I think it would be a matter of pride for everybody in this room that we can maintain parity with the EU.