Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank all the members of the committee for inviting me to appear today.
I have noticed that the media have not reported much on the committee's work, and yet you do excellent work, both for companies and Canada's economy, and for consumers.
For my part, I have followed your work with great interest, albeit from a distance, through the committee's website, and have published a regular update about it on our blog.
I have to admit that this is the first time I have been in a so-called lobbying position, and I was especially surprised by the number of approximations, exaggerations, and “alternative facts” that have been presented to you by various witnesses as scientific truth. I will come back to that later on.
First, allow me to introduce myself briefly. I am an Internet pioneer in Quebec. In 1994, I founded the first digital marketing agency, through which, for close to 20 years, I have helped various organizations such as VIA Rail, RDS and Club Med USA use the web to transform their marketing strategies, their sales strategies, and sometimes even their business model.
I have always considered email as being at the heart of any digital marketing strategy, and I started implementing email marketing strategies for our clients back in 1996.
In 2013, I left the agency to found Certimail, the company I am representing today, whose mission is to help SMEs increase the effectiveness of their email marketing while complying with Canada's anti-spam legislation, or CASL.
Far from being dogmatic, the observations and recommendations I will present today are based on 20 years of email marketing experience, and four years dedicated to analyzing CASL and its 13 regulatory instruments, in order to help dozens of SMEs of all sizes implement a compliance program based on the CRTC's requirements.
Before I get to the analysis of CASL and its enforcement, I would like to answer a simple question that the committee members have asked regularly, at nearly every meeting, without ever getting an answer, namely, what does it cost for a company to comply with CASL. The answer is simple. The compliance packages offered by Certimail cost $699 for a sole proprietorship or self-employed person, $1,249 for a small company with fewer than 10 employees, and between $3,000 and $15,000 for companies with between 11 and 300 employees. If my colleagues from Newport Thomson, Deloitte, or KPMG, which offer similar services to larger companies, had been invited to appear before the committee, they would have told you that their rates for compliance range from $25,000 to $100,000.
I think this is important information. I admit that I was surprised that neither the CRTC nor the various industry organizations that appeared before you were able to provide this essential and publicly available information.
That being said, I will focus on three elements: the importance and effectiveness of CASL, the inadequacy of the CRTC's approach to its enforcement, and a few recommendations to strengthen CASL by reducing its negative impacts.
Contrary to what many lobbyist have stated before the committee, CASL does not pertain to cybersecurity or computer security risks, but rather seeks to develop consumer confidence in electronic commerce and to develop Canadian industry.
As suggested in the report of the Task Force on Spam, which preceded the legislation, the legislation and its regulations seem more like rules of the road for electronic communications than legislation about information security threats, as people have led us to believe.
When I crossed the bridge this morning to attend your meeting, I noted that the complex and strict regulations that were established a century ago to guide the few automobile drivers of the time have not really compromised this mode of transport or that industry. The same thing applies to CASL.
These rules of the road for electronic communications are very important to Canadians. They demonstrated this by filing more than a million complaints in three years, without a single advertisement encouraging them to do so. There was no advertising campaign informing people who received spam that they could forward it to the Spam Reporting Centre. The idea caught on spontaneously and people filed more than a million complaints. These votes in support of CASL continue to come in by the thousands every day.
Moreover, this volume of complaints is sufficient to contradict a recent statement made to your committee by a Canadian Chamber of Commerce representative, namely, that the problem of unsolicited email has been resolved by anti-spam technology. Receiving unsolicited email is in fact still a major problem for a vast majority of Canada's population. Anti-spam technology is increasingly effective, but it has not solved the problem. Moreover, this technology is starting to show its limitations. Just ask the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which was short on tasers last week because the Taser server had treated its purchase orders as spam.
By its first anniversary, CASL had reduced the volume of spam received by Canadians by 37%. This shows the effectiveness of CASL for consumers. It is also effective for businesses, at least for those that want to do real email marketing, and not use email incorrectly to do traditional mass marketing from the Mad Men era.
Since CASL came into force, Canada has pulled ahead of the pack to become one of the two countries with the most effective email marketing by far. The other country is Australia, the only other country that has legislation that is as broad, complex, and strict as CASL.
The delivery rate, that is, the proportion of commercial email that is sent and is visible to addressees, that is not filtered by anti-spam or other systems, is in the order of 80% in most countries in the world. In Canada, that rate rose from 79% in 2014 to 90% today. The only country in the world with a similar success rate is Australia.
Similarly, the readership rate, that is, the proportion of marketing emails that are opened by addressees, fluctuates between 12% on the African continent and 24% in the United Kingdom. In the United States, it is 21%. With a readership rate of 32%, Canada is in second place, just behind Australia, where the rate is 33%. Before CASL came into force, the readership rate in Canada was just 26%.