Mr. Speaker, yes of course I mean this innocuous person the Minister of Industry.
In this House we often get into these partisan debates, that my guy is better than your guy, but I do not mean it that way. I genuinely want all Canadians to be proud of the government, and I am going to talk about the provincial governments in a minute too. They are very much partners and players in this. All Canadians benefit and all Canadians support anything that is done in this way. There has been enormous consultation. This has been worked on for years. Literally thousands of Canadians have been involved in the work leading up to this kind of policy decision.
Getting back to my example, what was coming out of the expert community was that we have to have leadership. People outside Canada are amazed at what Canada has been able to do. That has come about because the Minister of Industry has been so enormously engaged and proactive on these issues from the day he assumed that office.
The minister is a representative of the department. There are people in the department who predate this government and have made it possible for us to be as much in the forefront as we are. We should take time to recognize the hard work, intelligence and thoughtfulness of all the civil servants who support us. These people spend a lot of time and energy helping us be as prepared as we are for what is coming down the road.
I want to come back to the issue of the legislation in general. The detailed legislation has been talked about by the minister and others. It is available for everyone to see. What is important for us to think about is what needs to occur now. In thinking about electronic commerce, there is a very real example.
A group in one city in one province in Canada operates an electronic transaction server. That is the piece of equipment on which the transaction is completed. It is a secure environment where a consumer having decided to purchase something and a vendor having decided to sell something meet electronically so that sale is consummated. The money is transferred to the vendor and the good is transferred to the seller.
That transaction server is in a traditional sense the cash register in the store. It is where the bills have changed hands. It is located in one province. The vendor could be, and increasingly is, located anywhere in the world. The purchaser is also potentially anywhere in the world.
I go on the Internet in the morning and call up Economist magazine which I subscribe to. I am calling up a server that is located in London. I pick up the article I want. The article makes reference to a book. If I hit on that book it takes me to a server in the U.S. and asks if I want to buy the book. I can simply click on a button and buy the book because I am registered with the book seller.
That sale is cleared by a Visa clearance office in Vancouver. That is not in the future. That is today. It happens right now. The company that runs the transaction service in that case is in New York. The vendor is in the central United States. The magazine is in London and my Visa transaction clearance is in Vancouver.
Who pays the tax? How are we taxed on that? There are a variety of legislative regimes that govern all of those areas that are different. If we are to begin to feel the benefits from this, that we believe we can feel, I and I think most who are close to this file believe that we need to look for universal legislation. We need to look for policy that transcends not just a city, province or country but that eventually becomes global.
It becomes global because information is no longer static. Information on me and I suspect on everybody here resides in the U.S. on a variety of machines if we have any interactions, travelled down there or bought something. It will reside in Europe or in China.
When I first came into this House I had the privilege of representing the former house leader and now Deputy Prime Minister in London. Walking through the basement of Westminster I saw a bank machine. Just for fun I pulled out my local bank card, stuck it in and withdrew pounds. It shocked me that they could clear that thing so quickly.
I want the protection of my privacy to exist whether I use that bank machine in London, Paris or Beijing. It is to all our benefit.
Canada is fortunate given our federal structure and the very activist nature of our governments. Quebec has had privacy legislation for a very long time and privacy legislation that covers both the public and private sector. Other provinces are moving now to engage on this issue by bringing in legislation, looking at ways of dealing with the regulations.
We need to be careful. We do not want to impose a heavy handed regulatory environment on commerce. We have had enough experience over the last few decades with the positive and negative sides of that. But I as a consumer want my information protected.
E-commerce in a sense is a funny word because it invokes the issue of commerce, of a sale, of a transaction, but the same technology works in an information transaction. If I want to send secure information, my medical records, and I want a doctor here to be able to call up on his computer my medical record from my doctor's office in Winnipeg, which would be an enormous benefit to me and to the system, I want to make sure that transaction is done securely and in a way that protects my privacy.
What I would argue and what this bill provides for is a regime that supports the very thing that we talk about in this House, a partnership between all the provinces of Canada, all working together to develop a system of law and policy that provides equal protection for all Canadians no matter where they are at any time in any part of this country. I believe the rest of the world is watching what we are doing here in Canada. I believe that we will find that our law, our approach will form the basis for law and policy right around the globe.