Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise and speak today in support of my colleague, the member for Edmonton—Leduc, in whose name this legislation is presented.
As a hard-working member of the industry committee, the hon. member is in touch with the concerns of the marketplace and various business practices. I share his apprehension when it comes to the importance of protecting personal information about individuals. I also recognize the fact that this is a challenge of the information age and a relatively new problem.
Defining this issue may mean that more than one attempt may be necessary in order to address the predicament which Bill C-299 is seeking to address.
The issue of personal information, how it is obtained and its various uses, was not an issue that the residents of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke indicated to me was of urging and pressing necessity. However, during the last election, when one of my opponents reverted to an all too depressingly familiar style of negative campaigning that has come to characterize the old Liberal Party, the issue arose in a nuanced context to this private member's bill now before Parliament.
As is the practice of many members of Parliament, I communicate with the constituents of my riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke in a variety of different means. One way is by sending birthday greetings. In the case of birthday greetings, individuals will send me details on behalf of a friend or a loved one through various methods. Usually it is a child who sends in details of a parent who has reached a milestone of life and wishes a congratulatory message from his or her MP to help celebrate the occasion.
Only the Liberal Party could see something sinister in sending a birthday greeting or Christmas cards to individuals. Nevertheless, this was the issue that the Liberal Party deemed to be most important in my riding, and it proceeded to attack on that basis.
I am pleased to confirm, by my presence in the chamber today, that not only did this tactic backfire, but constituents tell me this caused my opponent to finish more poorly than did his predecessor. The electors, in their wisdom, gave me the honour of being re-elected for the third straight election with the highest percentage of the popular vote for a Conservative in the province of Ontario. The smart voters of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke are never wrong.
I relate this story to illustrate the difference between what Bill C-299 seeks to accomplish, which is to amend the Criminal Code to act as a deterrent to the fraudulent obtaining of personal information for abuse, and the generic use of information within the public domain, which is not the intent of this legislation to criminalize.
As a Conservative, I am proud to say that my party and I stand for less government, lower taxes, and a desire to interfere in the daily lives of Canadians in as few ways as possible. The one issue that separates the political labels of the left, which Canadians understand to mean Big Brother or more government, and the right, which Canadians understand to mean less government and more individual freedom, is the issue of personal information.
There are few topics I feel more strongly about than the privacy of individuals and the need to keep big government in check. However, the fact of the matter is that Canadians do live in the information age and in the electronic age a balance must be struck between the gathering of information and the use of that information.
Since I was re-elected I have been working on behalf of the people of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke to bring high speed broadband, the information highway, to all the residents in my riding, particularly the residents in the rural parts of my riding who are without high speed Internet service.
New jobs and businesses are opening fast in the field of technology. We need to be able to provide companies that wish to locate in our rural communities with a skilled workforce and access to high speed communications. People cannot develop the skills needed to work in these new jobs if the tools to learn are not provided for them. Businesses will not locate in the rural communities without access to high speed communications. Without broadband technology, businesses in rural Renfrew County will not be able to fully compete on a local or global basis.
The future economic well-being of our residents depends on the smooth flow of knowledge. The difficulty is once the information highway is built, some things that travel on the information highway are not wanted. Spam fits that definition.
The May 2004 Anti-spam Action Plan for Canada defines spam as “unsolicited commercial email”. By this definition, the firm MessageLabs estimated that spam accounted for as much as 80% of global email traffic at the end of 2004, up from about 10% in 2000.
Spam is more than a growing nuisance. It is a public policy issue that challenges governments, internal service providers, ISPs, other network operators, commercial emailers and consumers to work together in new ways, with each stakeholder group fully playing its part to solve the problem that threatens the interests of all. Spam annoys and offends Internet users. It also provides a vehicle for activities that are clearly illegal, or should be.
While Bill C-299 would not curb all spam, it should curb: malicious actions that cause harm to computers, networks or data, or use personal property for unauthorized purposes, for example, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, denial of service attacks, zombie networks; deceptive and fraudulent business practices, including online versions of traditional mail-based frauds, for example, the Nigerian bank account, or 419 scam, and spoofed websites masquerading as legitimate businesses; phising emails designed for identity theft or to steal money; and invasions of privacy, for example, email address harvesting, spyware.
Because of all the above threats, spam undermines consumer confidence in e-commerce and electronic transactions between citizens and their governments. In addition, it imposes significant costs throughout the economy. These costs fall on a wide range of stakeholders, including: ISPs and other network operators, large enterprise users, universities, government departments, which must invest in the technical, financial and human resources needed to deploy anti-spam technologies at the expense of investments in new or improved services and which must allocate resources to respond to customer complaints; legitimate commercial emailers and other users of email services whose messages get filtered out by an anti-spam technology before they reach their intended recipients; and private and public sector organizations which employees waste time dealing with spam sent to their business email address.
Ultimately, all these costs fall directly, or indirectly, on consumers and Internet end-users who must cover the costs of fighting spam not only by purchasing Internet security software, but also by forgoing other kinds of service improvements and paying higher prices for the online products.
In closing, I once again congratulate the member for Edmonton—Leduc for bringing forth this legislation to deal with a serious and growing problem. I look forward to working with the member as we seek to find a solution to this problem.