Mr. Speaker, part of this debate that is often overlooked is the cost to Canadian businesses and the problems that Canadian corporations have in managing their email networks. From personal experience, I can say that it costs billions of dollars for Canadian corporations to handle the volumes of spam that we are now seeing.
As the House knows, we in Parliament have size limits on our inboxes. The simple reality is that the volume of email coming into the House of Commons and Senate computer systems is such that a great volume of these emails are spam. While companies can put in place firewalls, routers and other forms of software on their servers to redirect or block spam, at the end of the day, a lot of this spam still makes its way through those firewalls and routers and into the email servers, which then become completely clogged and saturated with this spam. As a result, legitimate transactions and emails are often slowed down or mailboxes are restricted in terms of the amount of email they can handle in order to deal with all of the spam that is being received.
Backup systems have to be enlarged. Bandwidth has to be enlarged. Email systems have to be expanded. All of these represent hidden costs to Canadian businesses. Many times, the senior management of these businesses does not realize the number of dollars that are being wasted on IT departments and chief information officers to handle the volumes of spam that we are seeing.
I think this bill is a move in the right direction because it is going to help Canadian businesses combat the time wasting and resource wasting that this problem creates, despite the efforts taken to put network security in place and expand data storage systems.