Evidence of meeting #8 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was crtc.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sherry Romanado
Thank you very much.
Now, we will move into five-minute rounds.
The next round will go to MP Van Popta.
Conservative
Tako Van Popta Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
Thank you.
My question is for Mr. Lawford and follows on what Mr. Masse was just asking about.
The CRTC is obviously a key player in this whole thing of fighting against telephone and Internet fraud. You were suggesting that perhaps it's time for an investigation into the effectiveness of the CRTC.
Is there something missing in its enabling legislation or is it just ineffectiveness of the organization?
Executive Director and General Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
I won't go quite as far as to say it's ineffectiveness of the organization. They have a mandate, which is limited now, to stop telemarketing that's illegal and to do the do-not-call list. That's it. Their job is not to stop fraud, as Mr. Scott said very clearly.
Conservative
Tako Van Popta Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
Would it be helpful for the CRTC to have its mandate expanded? What can parliamentarians do to help?
Executive Director and General Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
Yes, it would help.
Conservative
Executive Director and General Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
This is the question of how to design a law that would specifically call something phone fraud, or wire fraud, as they call it in the United States, so that it's a separate fraud offence. You could think of things.
For example, at the moment, getting somebody to prosecute a fraud is difficult because you can't go back up the chain and make everybody who was involved in the calling—the actual person talking, and then the people who own and run this thing, whether they're in Canada or not—criminally liable for it. We might design a law that makes everybody in the calling operation have some level of criminal liability, so as to make it less attractive, less consequence-free, as Mr. Gamble said.
Conservative
Tako Van Popta Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
Good.
One of our presenters earlier this week said that despite having identified hundreds of thousands of fraud callers, they need approval of the CRTC to actually block them from reaching their customers.
Would you agree with that?
Director, Internet Society Canada Chapter
The current interpretation of the Telecommunications Act supports that view.
Executive Director and General Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
Here's the weird thing about this whole area. The calls that are made as robocalls are illegal. You're not allowed to call for commercial purposes with robocalls—the end. The only exceptions are for hospitals and schools and such things. The calls are illegal, but once somebody answers by pressing “2” or “1” and talks to somebody, that call only becomes fraud when you finally send the money. While the person is trying to scam you, there's no crime going on.
That's the trick. How do you make that part easy to solve and stop? The companies can't listen to the content, because they need a warrant. That's the conundrum we're facing.
Conservative
Executive Director and General Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
There is not an easy solution, but I'm suggesting that perhaps there could be a well-crafted law that might, if there are actual victims who lose money, trace it back to the calling operation. If you can prove that all those calls were sent out as stage one phishing—“Look, I got this fish on the hook”—and there were enough fish on the hook that we should prosecute the whole operation, there might be some way to do so.
Conservative
Tako Van Popta Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
In this fight against telephone fraud, we have talked about the CRTC and its regulatory power, but how effective a tool can technology be? I'm thinking specifically of STIR/SHAKEN. One of our presenters earlier this week said that they are ready to roll it out, but that people's personal devices don't have the technology yet.
Director, Internet Society Canada Chapter
There are two sides to STIR/SHAKEN. There's the network side, which we're more interested in, which is what we can do at the network level, blocking the calls before the consumer's phone even rings. Then there's what they refer to, which is the presentation layer, that checkmark or that notification to the end user on the phone that it's a blocked call.
There's a lot we can do to prevent the obvious stuff at the network level. Then the more fine-grained stuff will require new handsets and things such as that.
Conservative
Director, Internet Society Canada Chapter
That's unknown at this point, because the standards are still being worked on for that display level of things. Then we have the issue of all the Canadians who don't have even digital phones, such as the elderly and others, who still have analog devices that are incapable of even displaying augmented data.
Conservative
Tako Van Popta Conservative Langley—Aldergrove, BC
The timing of this is obviously going to rest significantly on consumers' ability or willingness to buy into the new technology.
Director, Internet Society Canada Chapter
That's right, so that we will get some benefit from day one from the network level of things.
Conservative
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sherry Romanado
Thank you very much.
The next five-minute round goes to MP Jowhari.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will be sharing my time with MP Casey, so I have a quick two and a half minutes for the question and response.
Mr. Gamble, you talked about STIR/SHAKEN. You talked about the policy, the technology and consumer privacy specifically around data source outsourcing for analytics. You also talked about the disadvantaging of the smaller carrier. What you said that stood out for me, though, was that there should have been some design consideration at the outset which was somehow missed that may have resulted in the disparity.
Can you shed some light on what those design changes should be to bring the two back together?
Director, Internet Society Canada Chapter
I'm not going to try to dive really deeply into the level of the technology design decisions that would warrant this, but the real challenge is that there's no easy way to move the ownership of a phone number from one party to another and delegate that responsibility. This is being worked on now, but in digital certificates it's highly difficult.
It really comes down to how we treat the reseller phone companies. They have always, in the phone networks of Canada, been lesser than the parents, but there's never been a reason for that to be an issue. If we allow more carriers to rise up to the facilities-based level, with SIP interconnections and such things, we can solve some of these issues.
It really goes back to the way the whole resale system was designed, and it can't easily be overhauled.
