Industry Committee on Oct. 31st, 2017

[Christopher Padfield]

We can go back and see what we can find out.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

So there's a series of things then. You need to know your bounce rate. You need to know how many people out of that 25,000 are consumers or businesses, and how many of them are moving from your site. You said you're transferring them on. Say I'm a business person and I need to be transferred on.

If it's your main tool, it seems to me there's a lot of information that can be pulled out of there that you should present to us.

[Christopher Padfield]

In terms of the delineation between a consumer and a business person, the site's meant to be user-friendly. We'd have to have them click on to say whether they're a consumer. There's no way we'd know that.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

There is a way you can assume that. We can make certain assumptions that if I'm coming as a business to find out information to make myself CASL-compliant, I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time on the consumer part. If a consumer's trying to find out stuff, maybe he's not going to spend a lot of time asking how to make their business CASL-compliant.

So although you can't check-box it off, you can make a lot of intelligent assumptions by doing that.

[Christopher Padfield]

Yes.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Could you please provide us that kind of information? I think it's something that you should be looking at to ask how effective, to my colleague Majid's point, the work is that you're doing.

Now, within that, because you don't have the numbers here, if I'm coming to try to understand something.... We've heard a lot of testimony about CASL being difficult to understand. Your job is to make it understandable. Do you have any metrics whatsoever on how easy or difficult it is, through your website, to understand?

[Christopher Padfield]

I just want to clarify that the enforcement agencies make their interpretations of the law.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I didn't ask about interpretation. I have it here that you say that—

[Christopher Padfield]

I guess the point is that when you refer to making it easy to understand, our role is really to make it clarifying...that it impacts you, and not to make it easy for you to comply. So when you talk about ease—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Yes: you have a “dedicated section...for businesses and organizations to protect their information and understand their responsibilities to comply”. So maybe you're not making it easy to understand, but you're making it understandable. Is that fair to say?

[Christopher Padfield]

Right: understand that they need to—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

They need to leave your site.

[Christopher Padfield]

And be able to understand—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

No, they need to stay at your site, because you said it here, that they go to fightspam.gc.ca: “for businesses and organizations to protect their information and understand their responsibilities to comply with CASL”.

I know you keep saying that every time they come here, you just want to push them away, but you stated here it's your responsibility to help them understand. In that, we need to be able to data mine and understand what you're doing to see if this is working. We've heard from a number of businesses and different stakeholders that it's very hard to understand this law due to the fact that definitions aren't well done or whatever series of reasons.

Now, we're coming to you to ask you guidance on that, and your answer keeps going, Mr. Padfield, that, well, we just push them on to CRTC.

[Christopher Padfield]

I guess to get back to my point around making the law easier to understand—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I didn't talk about “making” the law easier to understand, but about how easy to teach it is a reflection of how difficult it is to understand.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Very briefly.

[Christopher Padfield]

I guess I'm going back to the fact that we take what we can from the enforcement agencies to make a very simple assessment of what you need to understand to be able to begin to comply, but we won't tell someone whether they're complying or not. If there's a complexity issue, it's around the interpretations in the law and the law itself.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Jeneroux for five minutes.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Perfect. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of things to clarify before I get into my question.

You said you have a Twitter channel that went live in January of this year. Do you have what that Twitter channel is? What's the name of the Twitter account?

[Mélanie Raymond]

The Twitter account is linked to Facebook. It's just another channel that we're using to provide the same message, so it has the same name.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

What is it, though?

[Mélanie Raymond]

It's called “YourMoneyMatters”.

[Christopher Padfield]

Again, that's broader than CASL. That's a broader piece around financial issues for consumers in general.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Okay.

With these things that you've provided for us—thank you for doing that—who is the audience for this? Is it seniors? There seem to be some good messages there for seniors, for young kids as well. Is it for everybody? Do you have a specific audience?