I'm thinking on the fly here. First of all, changing the central mechanism would mean they would not need to get consent to send an electronic message. Now, that doesn't mean they could just go and blast away. There's still PIPEDA to consider. There's still the issue of how they get email addresses in the first place.
There are still barriers, which I think everyone would say are reasonable barriers, in the sense of restrictions on companies selling our personal information, including email addresses, but it would certainly unlock to an extent the issue of how you would collect email addresses for purposes of sending something. Or if someone sends you an email, you don't have to worry as much about how you respond and what the limits are: two years, six months, or what have you. It would reduce the compliance costs for new entrants.
Again, changing the thrust of the law would not mean that you could just go and scrape email addresses all over the place and blast away. I wouldn't advocate going that far.