moved that Bill C-234, an act to amend the Criminal Code (facsimile advertising), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, Bill C-234, which I am presenting today, is aimed at preventing the transmission by facsimile of unsolicited advertising for the sale of goods or services to an individual or a company.
The concern I will be addressing applies also to electronic facsimile, electronic mail and even to Internet.
With your permission, I would like to make two points. First, this House already knows, but to let the public watching us know, this bill is not a votable item. At the outside, we will have finished talking about it within an hour, and there will be no legislative follow-up to my remarks.
However, and this is my second point, the issue I am raising is very real and therefore should be given legislative attention in the near future. In this sense, our debate this morning will get people thinking and ultimately, perhaps, as I would hope, lead to the House adopting in due course legislation that meets the need.
What need? As you know, before I became a member of this House, I had another job. I was in business and I had a fax machine. In the morning, I would collect the faxes that had arrived during the night. There were those that had come from Europe, because of the time difference, with their day starting earlier than mine. There were, however, others that had been sent locally and had nothing to do with my company's business interests. I was getting what is commonly known as electronic junk mail.
If it were only occasionally, we could ignore it; if there was only a little bit of it, we could forget about it. But it is a regular happening, and the number of pages printed-at my expense or at the expense of the businesses receiving them, because it is their paper they are printed on-is far from few.
We have to understand the forces at play. The fax machine is an inexpensive way to reach anywhere in the world very quickly. When it is used for telemarketing or advertising, anyone anywhere can flood us with advertising we do not need and more often than we want it.
This sort of thing cannot be left strictly to chance. In the area of telephony, as you will recall, overzealous telemarketing has been regulated by the CRTC. Now, companies wishing to call numbers in series must follow the regulations it has established. The situation is not the same with regard to facsimiles.
Faxes have environmental and other disadvantages. A lot of paper is used needlessly, but environmental damage is not the only problem. There are also commercial disadvantages: while your fax machine is receiving unsolicited messages about things in which you are not interested and using up reams of paper in the process, your real clients are unable to communicate with you. You yourself cannot use your own fax machine to communicate with your business interests. There is a conflict between your interests and those of the companies that want to market their products without necessarily asking for your permission beforehand.
Allow me to quote from an Industry Canada document called Privacy and the Canadian Information Highway , which deals with the intrusion of the information highway on privacy: ``Citizens may also want to be protected from unwanted communications as a result of purchasing goods on the electronic highway''. I am not talking only about faxes, but also about electronic mail and transmission through the information highway.
The document goes on to say: "Disturbances or intrusions by telemarketers or targeted advertising mail is a privacy nuisance that concerns many Canadians. There is already `junk' fax, with solicitations over our fax machines for everything from coffee service to holiday trips". Should controls target marketing schemes that result from separate or related purchases, for instance, junk E-mail that follows a purchase of a Caribbean holiday with offers for a next trip?
If so, how? What rules should govern the collection and use of information about what people buy or other personal information transactions? How should these rules be balanced with the opportunity to be made aware of goods or services that people might want and need? The problem is not only the amount of time and paper used by your fax machine in receiving messages from outside parties, but also the fact that some businesses may use your or your company's own consumption profile to transmit targeted, unsolicited ads using your own resources, and may even paralyse your own operations in the process.
There is another aspect: fraudulent advertising. A recent investigation by the Montreal Urban Community Police Department on the First Nations Investors Group uncovered an almost $500,000 rip-off of some 20 residents of the Montreal region. According to police, the suspects recruited their investors mainly through electronic advertising, in particular by sending faxes directly to management consulting firms. Swindlers sent their targets faxes painting an enticing picture of the investment opportunities.
The advertising, in the name of Venture and Financing International Corporation, claimed to offer loans at attractive rates for financing residential or commercial buildings, or 1 per cent less than the rate in effect. Without going into details, this business fraudulently collected $500,000 by using the fax numbers of a highly targeted clientele.
Other uses however may be more desirable, for example, receiving your daily newspaper by fax. It is now possible for a publisher to send his readers, his subscribers, a daily newspaper either by the information highway-on the Internet-or by straight facsimile.
In fact, we know of a publisher who has 300 subscribers at $250 each a year. Mind you, this is very clever; there are no printing fees and no distribution fees, since the printing takes place at the receiving end, on the fax, photocopier or printer of the recipient.
I recall something that happened in Calgary. A computer specialty outlet refers to fax ads that zip through its machines as annoying junk that usually goes into the garbage. In its experience at least 10 sheets a day of irrelevant news has to be sorted. That is a problem. These things have to be sorted. They cannot just be looked on as junk. It must be sorted because in between these junk mail items could be real messages for business purposes.
From this same source cited by the Calgary Herald , some companies go nuts about fax firms, complaining advertisements invade their fax machines, tie up their lines and use their paper.
Furthermore, a spokesman from AGT says the Alberta phone company has no control over what travels across the lines and bears no responsibility for its customers. In this dimension there is a problem in Calgary, but it is not the only place.
In a law firm in Toronto a late night junk fax once consumed 99 pages of a lawyer's fax paper before the machine ran out. There is an added concern here. If the machine does run out of paper, not only is the paper spoiled but the machine is incapable of receiving additional faxes that could be most important for operations. The machine had been paralyzed by an outside party the company had no business with. The law firm complained that there was no way of contacting anybody to complain.
Some advertisements arrive daily just in case they were missed the previous day and become a major headache for any business. To add to the frustration, even if the offenders can be identified there is no way the offenders can be asked to stop.
There may be some hope somehow, somewhere. The CRTC is apparently under way to get authority to restrict junk faxes this fall. We are at the end of this fall and I do not know where it is at this point. A new national telecommunications act will come into effect. The CRTC unfortunately is still in a state of considering ways to exercise that control. It is not a matter of controlling and regulations; it is a matter of having the technological means to do it.
Bell Canada, which has also received floods of complaints, asked the CRTC to be allowed to disconnect those who make an abusive use of junk faxing. Bell defines this kind of junk faxes as "unsolicited material promoting the sale of goods or services where there is no business relation between the person sending the material and the one receiving it and where this has been going on for over six months".
Bell Canada's proposal is to suspend service for five days to anyone sending junk facsimiles to the same telephone number more than twice in the same month. After suspending service for these reasons three times, the company would consider terminating service permanently.
As you can see, there is a problem. And this problem does not affect just one municipality here and there. It is from coast to coast. Telephone companies are aware of the problem, but they do not have the necessary means of coercion to act on it. The CRTC is reviewing the issue, but does not see how it could be resolved through technology alone.
So I hope that my remarks will have alerted the House to the problem, to how extensive it is and to the need to take action, not in three, four or five years, but as soon as possible. That is my wish.