Sure. Thanks for the question.
From a large business perspective, you gather the resources and you do what you need to do to comply. As someone who has worked on implementing CASL internally at a few organizations, but also in working with external counsel and my colleagues in other companies, and the discussion we have at the CBA across the different sections as well, it is truly amazing the amount of time spent, and org charts and step-by-steps that you have to develop in order to make sure that you're actually complying with all the different pieces because it is unnecessarily complex. You shouldn't need a lawyer to implement CASL, and unfortunately, you do. When you think of a small enterprise where they have a few employees, or larger ones—and you heard from the Canadian Marketing Association, an organization which in about 2025 may have spent upwards of $40,000—it's mind-boggling.
Once again, the idea is not to get rid of CASL, but rather to have it focus on what it should be focusing on. For small and medium-sized enterprises to be sending electronic communications to their customers or trying to do prospects, even before CASL came around, people used to insist on consent. However, it's all the little things you need to do to ensure that you have complied that bogs everybody down and it's the fallout from the non-compliant element. If it were more akin to PIPEDA, on which we heard from Commissioner Therrien before, it's a complaints-based model. If you make a mistake or you have a judgment call that you make that's not quite agreed to by everybody else, you have an opportunity as an organization to make it right without necessarily seeing yourself subject to a very formal investigation or fines.
Unfortunately, in the way it's been enforced here in Canada by the CRTC, it has had a chilling effect. You don't want to be that organization that then has to have a settlement agreement or notice of violation.