Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's always a pleasure to be here, colleagues. I remember a good old saying that I used when I was a journalist: "When it's good, it's never long." I thought Mr. Masse's questions were very good and relevant.
Generally speaking, you always get the best and the worst with these calls. That's also true of virtually all information technologies. You can have excellent tools and then see them used in unacceptable ways.
And let's not fool ourselves: we're all politicians here; we all ran election campaigns a year ago, and I bet we all used robocalls. I'm very proud of my white hair, which proves I'm not the most adept person in this area, but in the end I agreed to spend a little money on robocalls, which is quite unusual for me. I have to admit I was really impressed with the real results I got; the calls let me contact 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 persons an hour. I have to say it's cost-efficient.
You mentioned the initiative that Bell Canada took in response to your invitation to detect and address fraud proactively. That's the kind of initiative we should promote and encourage. When private businesses that thrive on these calls decide to discipline themselves that way, we acquire better tools for the future. So I welcome that great initiative.
Now I want to discuss more technical matters in all this chaos.
First, is there any way to block at source calls from outside the country, whether from the United States or another unknown and distant country? Is that technically and legally feasible? Obviously, everything can be done under an act, if necessary. Could Canadian telephones be configured to block all numbers from area codes other than 418 or 613, for example?