Mr. Speaker, I begin by complimenting the Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Industry and the minister for these amendments to the Competition Act. Especially in the area of telemarketing scams, one cannot believe the amount of damage and harm being caused in this nation to many of our seniors. This is the type of bill I am sure all parties would want to put through the House as fast as we can. I am sure there is not a member in the House of Commons who has not had a phone call from a son or a daughter of a senior citizen to try to get us as parliamentarians to amend the Competition Act to provide not just the Competition Bureau but the various police forces in Canada with the necessary tools that will enable them to do their jobs in shutting down these deceptive telemarketing scams.
My understanding is that the amendments the minister and the parliamentary secretary have brought forward provide for a new criminal offence for deceptive telemarketing, much stricter disclosure requirements, a more effective and quicker resolution for misleading advertising and deceptive practices, and an investigative tool that will allow the police forces to close in on the organizations that are using these price-fixing, bid-rigging and deceptive telemarketing systems.
We sit here and draft legislation on a continual basis, but sometimes we forget the human factor that generates the legislation we are drafting. In the case of these telemarketing scams that deal mostly with senior citizens, I am sure we all realize that very rarely will a senior citizen call his or her MP and say “I have been had” because most of the senior citizens who are victims of these telemarketing scams feel embarrassed that they have been had.
In fact there are incidents, and I have heard this from some of my own constituents, where sons and daughters go into their parents' homes and suddenly see different items, such as paintings, rubber boats and different sorts of trinkets. They will ask their mother or father where they got these things and the parents will slough it off. The parents do not want to tell because they feel embarrassed. It is almost an inadvertent experience that it will be discovered that the senior citizen is being had by these vicious, deceptive telemarketing scams. God only knows the thousands and thousands of senior citizens who are victims who may not have living children. We never hear about those cases.
I do not want to take up a lot of the House's time on this issue today, but I do want be on the record as being forcefully supportive of Bill C-20 which will amend the Competition Act. I urge all members of the House to push this through in a speedy way so that the various enforcement agencies can shut down these operations which are active in every province of our country.