Mr. Speaker, in 2004-05 a Liberal government anti-spam task force consulted the public widely and had round tables with stakeholders. This important bill to limit spam did not come out of the blue. There were four major recommendations from the task force.
The first is prohibiting the sending spam without the prior consent of recipients. I cannot imagine anyone in the public who would not want this to come into effect very quickly. We all get hundreds and hundreds of nuisance and unwarranted spam. People must be dreaming for the day when they will no longer be sent. Quite often it is the very same message with a different title, which I will talk about a little later. This will be a very popular part of the bill for businesses and anyone who uses a computers.
The second is the use of false or misleading statements disguising the origin or true intent of the email. I am sure everyone has received emails that they have opened by accident because they are very clever titled such as “You haven't paid your bill” or other more creative ways of getting us to open the email. Then there is the very same email we received one hundred times trying to sell us the very same product.
The third major recommendation from the Liberal task force is the installation of unauthorized programs prohibiting that and no one would want that to occur.
The fourth is the unauthorized collection of personal information or email addresses. That is very significant. Canadians and businesses do not want the unauthorized collection of their personal information. All kinds of damage can be done.
We only need to go back to the debates we have had recently on commercial crime to see the huge multi-billion dollars in damages and lives ruined because information of individuals has been used for fraudulent purposes. Computer technology is relatively new. In a previous job before I became a member of Parliament there were no computers in business. In that it is a new technology, people, especially seniors who were not used to this throughout their lives, could easily be hoodwinked into giving personal information, which is then be used to victimize them. It is very important this not be allowed to continue.
Let us look at the scenario where millions of unauthorized, unwanted messages or spam go through the Internet. How important is the Internet to today's life? It is really a backbone for many people and for many businesses. The whole way that our society functions—