As the member from Kelowna says, it made sense. It was a good model. The government should have used it.
The other issue is really the administration and maintenance of a registry in Canada in general, because as so many MPs and Canadians across this country know, the government has been rather lacking in the whole establishment and maintenance of registries, the firearms registry being of course the most obvious example of what not to do in setting up a registry.
There are certain questions that I believe we as legislators should ask at this point. How will this list be maintained? How will the list be accessed? Who will maintain the list? If it is not the CRTC, which organization will do it? What will be required of telemarketers? How often must they check the list? Will there be a maintenance fee for telemarketers? Who will pay for the list? Who will pay for updating, monitoring and enforcing the list?
These are all questions that are not answered in the legislation and they must be before Parliament passes it.
Why is there no requirement for an annual report to Parliament on the cost of the administration of the list? The fact is that we in Parliament must have more details on how the CRTC plans to set up, administer and regulate this do not call registry.
In addition to the private member's bill I mentioned, there are two excellent examples of do not call registries, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States. I want to touch briefly on the American list because I believe it offers Canada some guidance.
The American act is called the telephone consumer protection act. It is extremely detailed. It restricts the use of phones and fax machines to deliver unsolicited advertisements and it limits the hours during which telemarketers can call, something that was referenced by the previous speaker; we get the same complaints when telemarketers call on Sunday mornings or late at night. These are reasonable restrictions that we can put on telemarketers.
However, my point is that this is all laid out in the American legislation. The Americans did the proper thing. They laid it out in detail instead of just introducing a bill with no details and hoping that the committee could fix it.
On June 26, 2003, the Federal Communications Commission revised its rules implementing the telephone consumer protection act. The FCC established, in coordination with the Federal Trade Commission, a national do not call registry. The registry is nationwide in scope and includes virtually all telemarketers, with the exception of political organizations, charities and telephone surveys, three of the exemptions that I mentioned.
A telemarketer or a seller may call a consumer with whom it has an established business relationship for up to 18 months after the consumer's last purchase, delivery or payment even if the consumer's number is on the national do not call registry. Consumers registered on the national registry will be able to provide prior express permission in writing to companies from which they wish to continue to receive telemarketing calls.
The initial legislation tabled in Congress looked a lot like Bill C-37. The major difference was the oversight embedded in the bill by Congress. The FCC and FTC had to report to the House of Representatives within 45 days of the bill becoming law with an analysis of the telemarketing rules, any inconsistencies between the rules and the effect of such inconsistencies on consumers and persons paying for access to the registry, and proposals to remedy any such inconsistencies.
In addition, the American legislation required an annual report and includes some details required of the report, such as the number of people using the list, the fees collected for access to the registry and an analysis of the progress and the operation and enforcement of the registry.
This is a piece of legislation that the Conservative Party believes we can model our legislation on. We can certainly model our legislation on the private member's bill of the member for Burlington from the last session. It would be interesting to find out why the government in fact did not model Bill C-37 on either of those previous pieces of legislation.
In conclusion, I want to state very clearly that the Conservative Party will support the establishment of a national registry as long as it is detailed in the legislation, as long as the parameters are set by Parliament, as long as we know exactly who is going to administer the list and the details are set out, and as long as there are some reasonable exemptions provided for charities, for political organizations and for companies that wish to contact their current customers.
I think those are all reasonable requests that our party is making. We certainly hope that we can fix this bill at committee and that this type of legislation or this concept of a registry will become law in Canada in a very short time.