Industry Committee on Oct. 26th, 2017

[Maxime Bernier, Conservative, Beauce, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Jowhari now has the floor.

You have five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and hopefully it's a generous five minutes as well.

Mr. Le Roux, I'm going to start with you and ask for some clarifying data, and then I'm going to move to Mr. Osborne and ask for some specific recommendations.

The focus is going to remain on the small business. By way of preamble, I'd like to give you the makeup of my riding, the riding of Richmond Hill. Based on 2011 data, we have roughly 8,000 small businesses. Eighty per cent of those are small businesses that have between one and four employees. Another 10% have between five and 10 employees. They use digital marketing to communicate either with their customers or with other small businesses.

I'll start with Mr. Le Roux.

You mentioned that the cost for small businesses with one or two employees is about $699, and for those with between two and 10 it's about $1,294. This is the cost that your company charges, or that the small business incurs, to be able to understand how to be compliant with CASL. Is that correct?

[Philippe Le Roux]

In fact, the goal is to have them comply with the law. At the end of the process, they have completed their compliance program; they have the documents required by the CRTC.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Exactly. This is where I wanted to go.

Question number one: this cost is a one-time cost and applies for a certain period of time—true or false?

[Philippe Le Roux]

It is a one-time cost. You only pay the fee once.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Great.

[Philippe Le Roux]

Our certification is valid for one year, however. We provide one year of support and regulatory monitoring.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Perfect.

[Philippe Le Roux]

The following year, if they want to renew their certification, it will cost them between $100 and $300 a year.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

I want to now move to the businesses. For businesses, based on the assessments you've done, what type of human capital and cost do they have to incur to maintain their compliance with CASL on an ongoing basis? Do they have to hire one person? Is it 0.5 FTE? Is it a dollar per transaction? Do you have any data?

[Philippe Le Roux]

This is done through automated systems nowadays, most of which are free for small business. If you have a 50,000 client data base, there will be costs, but it will generally cost between $100 and $300 a month, and if you have 50,000 clients in your data base, that is not a problem.

I thank you for the question on the solutions that make this easy to manage, because I wanted to raise that topic.

There are technological solutions designed in Canada that help companies comply with CRTC requirements. There aren't enough of them, because the CRTC does not communicate enough, but there are some. Most of these solutions offer free versions to very small businesses. So there really aren't additional labour costs or any other costs.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Great.

I want to go quickly now to the challenges. Based on all the work you've done so far to help small businesses comply, what were the top two or three challenges those companies faced in implementing and complying with CASL?

[Philippe Le Roux]

As I said earlier, the CRTC's lack of clarity as to the interpretation of the act forces us to impose excessive measures on companies so that they comply with the law, but they have to be ready for anything. That is a big problem.

Another problem involves the synchronization of consents. Earlier there was a debate about individual emails and group emails. Currently, when someone unsubscribes from a newsletter, the CRTC considers that that individual has unsubscribed from the entire company. That means that an employee can no longer send an Outlook email to that person because he unsubscribed from the newsletter. The fact that the withdrawal of consent applies to the entire company is a problem.

Consequently, we ask that the request for consent and the withdrawal of consent be circumscribed. The withdrawal of consent should be limited to the consent request.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Would the technical solution that you're talking about help with that?

[Philippe Le Roux]

The problem is that the CRTC asks us to go beyond the technology and see to it that two unrelated technologies communicate. It can be done, but it is complicated, because the CRTC did not inform the tech businesses about this, and so they did not think to manage that aspect.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

I want to move to Mr. Osborne.

We've heard the good, the bad, and the ugly, so now I want some recommendations. Perhaps you can give me two or three recommendations in any of the areas—specifically on small businesses, specifically on the cost side, and specifically on compliance—so that we can make it easier for businesses. What would be your recommendation? What should change in CASL to make it easier for businesses to comply?

[William Michael Osborne]

Assuming you're not with me on moving from opt-in to opt-out—I suspect that ship has sailed—what I'd suggest is this.

Number one, find a better way of carving out those one-off emails that are written by a real person.

Monsieur Le Roux was right that there are often exemptions that we can rely on, but there are uncertainties around them. For example, if you read the definition of “personal relationship”, it's a nightmare. It's just impossible. I have no idea what it means, and I'm a lawyer with nearly 20 years' experience.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So the first one is to exclude one-off emails.

[William Michael Osborne]

Correct.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

What's the second one?

[William Michael Osborne]

I don't mean the automated ones that Monsieur Le Roux was talking about but real one-off emails. The second one is to clean up the definitions. There is a lot of discussion around subsection 6(6) of the law. Here's the problem. You have a definition of a commercial electronic message that's basically—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

That's fine. Good. Clean up the definition in subsection 6(6). We'll go back, because you already touched on that.

What's the third one?

[William Michael Osborne]

The third one.... Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I have only a little time, and I want to be very focused on—