Mr. Speaker, I greatly enjoyed the speech given by my colleague and friend, the member for Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques. He is perfectly right; the bill before us is not just about e-mail and the associated personal information.
I would like to give an example so that all those in the House and listeners at home will understand what we are really talking about. You go into a department store. We have all been in these stores which, in addition to selling things, offer credit cards, which record our name, address, telephone number and postal code when we buy something there.
The store collects all this information and then, with the help of its computer, is able to produce a list of people who bought a sports item, for example, and then turn this list over to the publisher of a sports magazine, say. These lists command quite a price, apparently going for a dollar and up per name.
This is how it is that members of the public receive junk mail. For anyone wondering where on earth they got our address, and how they knew we were interested in whatever it was, if in fact we even were, because sometimes we were just buying a present for somebody else, this is how.
I mentioned department stores; I could mention many other organizations, not always commercial, and various associations. In Quebec, such a practice is not allowed. It is an indictable offence. But in the rest of Canada, it is allowed and legal—unless a business follows its own code of ethics.
The bill before us would not necessarily make this practice illegal, and this is the purpose of my question to the hon. member. Clause 4.3.7 of the schedule deals with the consent principle and provides the following: b ) a checkoff box may be used to allow individuals to request that their names and addresses not be given to other organizations. Individuals who do not check the box are assumed to consent to the transfer of this information to third parties;
So, we go to a store, buy something and get a receipt. The clerk says “Look at the receipt. There is a small box”. We think “fine”, but the act has just been circumvented.
This is what will happen with this bill, which provides just the opposite of what we have in Quebec, where a person must check off the box to allow the transfer of information to third parties. Here, it is exactly the opposite. In Quebec, there is no consent unless otherwise specified, whereas in the legislation before us, consent is implicit, unless otherwise stated.
I wonder if the hon. member for Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques could comment on this.