Debates of May 7th, 2009

Electronic Commerce Protection Act

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-27, the electronic commerce protection act, on behalf of New Democrats. We will be supporting the bill, in principle, but we feel that it is important for it to go to committee for extensive review to ensure we get it right. I will be speaking a little later about some previous legislation where we did not get it right, and, in fact, the correction is buried in this bill.

I thank the member for Windsor West for the good work he has done on this file and look forward to more comments from him when it gets to committee.

I want to talk about some key elements of the bill, why it is needed, the cost of spam to business and citizens and some other details that are in the bill that are not directly related to electronic commerce protection.

When the government came forward with this bill it said that it was about protecting the privacy and personal security concerns associated with spam, counterfeit websites and spyware. It said that spam and related online threats were a real concern to all Internet users as they can lead to the theft of personal data, such as credit card information, which is identity theft; online fraud involving counterfeit websites, phishing; the collection of personal information through illicit access to computer systems, spyware; and false or misleading representations in the online marketplace.

The proposed legislation would also treat unsolicited text messages or cellphone spam as--

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Order, please. I apologize but there is a conversation happening very close to me. I would ask the members to leave the House to continue that conversation if they wish.

The hon. member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have a couple of key points from the background information that was provided on the bill. It reads:

The bill also addresses the legislative recommendations of the Task Force on Spam, which brought together industry, consumers and academic experts to design a comprehensive package of measures to combat threats to the online economy.

The intention of the proposed legislation is to deter the most dangerous and damaging forms of spam from occurring in Canada and to help drive spammers out of Canada.

This bill proposes a private right of action, modelled on U.S. legislation, which would allow businesses and consumers to take civil action against anyone who violates the ECPA. The proposed ECPA's technology-neutral approach allows all forms of commercial electronic messages to be treated the same way. This means that the proposed bill would also address unsolicited text messages, or “cellphone spam”, as a form of “unsolicited commercial electronic message”.

The bill would establish a clear regulatory enforcement regime consistent with international best practices and a multi-faceted approach to enforcement that protects consumers and empowers the private sector to take action against spammers.

An important proponent of the proposed ECPA is the enforcement regime whereby the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Competition Bureau and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner would be given the authority to share the information and evidence with their counterparts who enforce similar laws internationally....

It goes on to talk about the administrative monetary penalties of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million in all other cases. It talks about the CRTC role and the role of the Privacy Commissioner.

I know that many of the people listening to this debate know what spam is but I want to give a definition because, like anything else, spam means one thing to one person and something else to another. Spam is identified as the abuse of electronic messaging systems, including most broadcast mediums' digital delivery systems, to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term applies to similar abuses in other media instant messaging: news net news groups spam, web search engine spam, spam and blogs, wikispam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions and the file sharing network.

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold centres accountable for their mass mailing. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high.

The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

I want to talk briefly about the costs. There are certainly costs to business when we talk about the filters and all the mechanisms that they need to put in place in order to prevent spam from getting into their systems, whether it is their cell phone systems or their Internet or email systems.

There is also the cost to workers. Many times when we are talking about businesses in the House, we are often talking about productivity and efficiency. In some of the previous work I have done, when we talked to businesses about how to improve productivity and efficiency, we often looked at time management techniques. One of the statistics that came from looking at time management techniques was that every time people were interrupted at a task, it would take them seven minutes to get back to the level where they left off.

Every time workers have their systems infiltrated by spam, we see a direct impact on the productivity of that company. Even if workers set time aside to look at their email, when they are dealing with junk email, it prevents them from dealing with the other activities before them. We know it takes a significant amount of time to get back to the place they left off. Therefore, there is a direct impact on worker productivity.

Many of us in the House have experienced spam on what should be a fairly highly protected system. It is an annoyance, a cost factor and extremely disruptive.

Some citizens are more vulnerable to spam. Fraud is involved, both in terms of stealing identity and in terms of having vulnerable people being hooked into purchasing goods and services that they do not need and which are often not of the quality and substance one would expect.

Therefore, there is a very real cost to businesses, to consumers and to the average citizen.

The important thing to point out about this legislation is that Canada is the only G7 country without anti-spam legislation. We often like to tout ourselves as being a proactive and progressive country and here we are lagging seriously behind. In fact, Canada ranked fifth worldwide as a source of web-based email spam, trailing only Iran, Nigeria, Kenya and Israel. It is a pretty sad track record to say that we are one of the countries that is a haven for spammers. Our track record is so bad that we are considered almost lawless when it comes to preventing spam.

Part of what we know about this is that companies anxious to target Canadian-based spammers have been forced to turn to other countries to do the job because we do not have legislation. They actually need to go to international law enforcement agencies that look at criminal spam activities. However, they have difficult enforcing any legislation because the Canadian authorities lack the requisite investigatory powers.

Michael Geist said:

The fact that organizations are forced to use U.S. courts and laws to deal with Canadian spammers points to an inconvenient truth -- Canadian anti-spam laws are woefully inadequate and we are rapidly emerging as a haven for spammers eager to exploit the weak legal framework.

We can see that there is sufficient information out there to say that Canada needs to take action and it is long past due.

In an article from December 16, 2008, CBC News, it says:

Canadian computers — many of them unwittingly — send out over nine billion spam e-mails a day, almost five per cent of all global spam traffic, according to a report from network and internet security firm Cisco. In an annual security report...Cisco estimated almost 200 billion messages per day, or 90 per cent of all e-mails sent worldwide — can be defined as spam, double the volume of the previous year.

I talked earlier about the cost to business, the cost to workers and the cost to citizens. When we look at that volume, it is shocking. Again, Canada has known about this problem for many years and it is only now that we are getting legislation.

I want to talk briefly about some of the key components of the legislation. There are three primary prohibitions. This bill would require all senders to obtain express consent before sending commercial electronic messages, including email, instant messages and so on, and to include contact and unsubscribed information. It would also require provisions designed to counter phishing, spyware and botnets used to send spam.

Various sections deal with this but I want to deal with three requirements: the form, consent and jurisdiction. The law requires that the identification of the person sending the message, as well as on whose behalf it is sent is included, contact information of the sender, because I think many of us have ended up with messages that we have no idea who is behind the sending, and an unsubscribe mechanism. The unsubscribe mechanism must allow for an easy opt-out by email or hyperlink that remains valid for at least 60 days after the message is sent. The sender has 10 days to comply with the unsubscribe request, and currently we know that spammers use the unsubscribe button to actually send more spam. If this is truly enforced, this unsubscribe mechanism, it will actually cut off some of the junk email that we are currently getting.

I want to touch briefly on the enforcement provisions. What we know is that the enforcement provisions do not have any real teeth. We can put all the fines we want in the act, but if we do not have the resources and the tools to commit to enforcement, they are meaningless.

I want to briefly talk about the do-not-call list because some changes to that legislation are embedded in Bill C-27.

In an article by Geist, he says:

Government Quietly Lays Groundwork For Overhaul of Do-Not-Call List....

We know in this House that there have been some serious problems with the do-not-call list. When I talked earlier about the need to have this bill go to committee, what we want to do is ensure the bill accurately deals with the problem that is before this House. We saw this with the do-not-call legislation and with the voter identification where a bill was put before the House but the government did not get it right and it had to make amendments to the bills, which was time-consuming and costly.

Therefore, it is very important that the bill comes before the committee and has a full and extensive review to make sure that the bill is actually going to deal with the spam problem.

In Geist's article, he said:

Four years after the National Task on Spam unanimously recommended that the Canadian government introduce anti-spam legislation...the Government took action by tabling Bill C-27....

While the introduction of anti-spam legislation is long overdue, one of the most significant changes was not reported or even included in the government's briefing materials. Buried at the very end of the 69-page bill, are provisions that would lay the groundwork to kill the National Do-Not-Call list.

It is interesting that it was buried at the end of the bill and not included in any briefing documents, because what it actually says is, “Oops, we blew that initial piece of legislation”.

He continued:

The proposed approach is very complicated, but boils down to the government repealing the provisions that establish and govern the do-not-call list. In its place, the ECPA approach of requiring an opt-in would apply, meaning that Canadians would no longer need to register their phone numbers on a do-not-call list. Instead, the presumption would be that telemarkets could not call without prior consent. The ECPA would also bring with it stronger penalties (up to $10 million) and fewer exceptions.

Although the do-not-call list is less than a year old, change cannot come soon enough. It faced severe criticism earlier this year when it was reported that out-of-country telemarketers, who are out of the regulatory reach of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, were accessing the list and making unwanted calls to Canadians. With more than six million numbers now registered on the list, the prospect of do-not-call registration leading to more calls rather than less instantly became a disturbing reality for millions of Canadians.

What that is talking about is people who registered their numbers, and then telemarketers outside of the country accessed the do-not-call list to call people. That seems like a pretty good gap in the legislation.

I hear some of my colleagues calling it a boondoggle. I would certainly say that it is a serious problem when the very legislation that is supposed to protect consumers actually results in more calls to them.

This is buried in this piece of legislation, changing the goof-up.

Geist said:

While the misuse of the do-not-call list remains a concern, a review of thousands of pages of internal government documents released under the Access to Information Act reveal that it is only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to lax list distribution policies, the enforcement side of the do-not-call list raises serious alarm bells with the majority of complaints being dismissed as invalid without CRTC investigation, the appearance of a conflict of interest in sorting through complaints, and a regulator that has been content to issue to “warnings” rather than levying the tough penalties contained in the law.

He went on to say:

The proliferation of the do-not-call list is certainly disconcerting, but [the] picture that emerges about its enforcement is even more troubling. The documents reveal that the CRTC receives over 20,000 telemarketing complaints each month, many involving the do-not-call list (some complaints may relate to other telecommunications rules that cover automated dialers or curfews).

The article goes on to talk about the fact that the initial evaluation of complaints is handled by Bell, which manages the do-not-call list rather than the CRTC. Here we have industry policing the do-not-call list and deciding whether complaints are legitimate or not. It goes on to talk about the fact that, for example, in January, Bell reported there were only 42 valid prima facie national do-not-call violations, while 3,033 national do-not-call complaints were ruled invalid. That is, in 42 out of 3,033 complaints, it was ruled by industry, Bell, that the complaints were not valid.

That does sound a little bit like the fox in the henhouse to me. So when we are talking about enforcement, as the member for Windsor West has rightly pointed out, there are some concerns about whether the enforcement mechanisms in the bill will actually be applied.

Geist goes on to say:

Complaints that survive Bell’s initial round of scrutiny go to the CRTC for further investigation. To date, the CRTC has sent out approximately 70 warning letters where it believes there are reasonable grounds to conclude that the organization is not in compliance with the do-not-call list legislation. Recipients of the letters are asked to take “corrective action” to address the concerns and warned that failure to do so could lead to penalties of up to $15,000 per violation for corporations. Notwithstanding that threat, the CRTC has yet to levy any fines.

When we have legislation that proposes a maximum penalty for individuals of $1 million, and $10 million for any other person, it sounds like pretty hefty fines. However, we need to put forward a mechanism that, first of all, allows appropriate investigation without interference by industry.

With regard to Bell, I do not know about anybody else, but I certainly receive messages from Bell. If I were to complain in regard to the do-not-call list and Bell is the investigator, I wonder what kind of independent scrutiny would be paid to that investigation.

The enforcement piece of this is critical. Canada's reputation internationally with regard to spam is in shreds. In order for us to tell the international community that we are going to walk the talk on this, we need to ensure that resources are put in place to make sure that the enforcement mechanism actually happens.

In conclusion, the New Democrats are in support of sending this bill to committee. I want to reiterate our position that it is very important that we have experts and technical witnesses who can deal with the content of this bill to ensure that Canada will actually be able to say, “Yes, we have anti-spam legislation that is going to stand up to international scrutiny, has appropriate enforcement mechanisms, and will actually protect businesses, consumers and Canadian citizens against both fraud and impact on the cost to productivity in this country.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry]

Madam Speaker, notwithstanding the fact that the member spoke more about other legislation than this legislation, it sounds as though the NDP will be supporting this. I have a few comments after listening to what she had to say.

First, I will talk about one difference in the piece of legislation she was talking about versus this one. One of the things this bill has in it is a need to opt in. From a business standpoint, if a business wants to send a consumer emails advertising something, the consumer has to opt in to that. The company has to make sure that in the normal course of business it acquires a person as a customer or it advertises to the person who then indicates in some way that he or she actually wants to receive things from that company. That is different from what she was talking about being one of the problems of the do-not-call registry.

She also talked a bit about time. While it is clear that there is a need for this type of legislation, one of the advantages in having taken the time is that we have the opportunity to learn from best practices around the world that have been used in places like Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., and to implement those best practices into this legislation.

As well, we have the opportunity to set up a mechanism that allows us to work with jurisdictions around the world to ensure that we have enforcement that reaches beyond our borders, because of course, this is a cross-border issue. It is a global issue. This bill would allow the agencies charged with enforcement to work with similar agencies in other countries to ensure that we are able to tackle the issue of spammers sending spam to Canada from other countries, and also deal with our own issues of Canadian companies, organizations or individuals sending spam to other countries. We can now be made aware and then act according to the new rules that are in place.

I will wrap up with a question. Given that the NDP intends to support this bill and that there was some concern expressed about the time it has taken, and particularly given the fact that we are in another minority government context and do not know at which point Parliament might dissolve and we might be forced into another election and all legislation would die again, how dedicated would the NDP be to ensuring that this legislation gets through committee quickly, gets properly studied but becomes a priority for the committee, and then is brought back and passed through the House as quickly as possible?

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to correct a piece of information the member has put out there.

When I was talking about the do-not-call list, I was specifically talking about Bill C-27. I could refer the member to page 56 of the bill, and the clause relating to sections 41.1 to 41.7, which specifically relate to the do-not-call registry. Therefore, I was talking about the current piece of legislation.

When the member talks about what the NDP will do around the passage of this bill, it is incumbent upon members of this House to ensure that when they pass legislation, it actually is going to do the job that it purports to do. Again I just need to reference the do-not-call registry to demonstrate how we now have another bill having to deal with a past mistake. That is a waste of this House's time. We are now having to talk about the do-not-call registry once again because we did not get it right the first time. New Democrats will ensure that they study this bill very carefully to make sure that it is going to do the job it is supposed to do.

I also want to go back to the member's statement about businesses getting their customers' consent, and I specifically did say that. What I said was that the bill requires all senders to obtain express consent before sending commercial electronic messages. That is an important aspect of this bill and we would support getting permission to receive mail from a business.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member, in light of the request of the parliamentary secretary to consider passing this bill as quickly as possible, if she and others have considered the true, massive complexity lying behind our attempt to regulate this field. I will just ask her one question as an example.

The bill deals with freedom of communication. It deals with what is actually a charter right, a very conspicuous charter right. I wonder if anyone has noticed that the bill prohibits the sending of a commercial electronic message to an address, not a person but an address. It then says it can only be done if there is consent. It is an offence if it is done without the consent of the person to whom the electronic message is sent, but the offence has been framed as one where a message is sent to an electronic address, not a person.

There does not appear to be any place in the bill where the electronic address is actually matched up with a person. I think we are going to have to get out the chalkboard at the committee and go through this very carefully to try to get it right.

If it is the view of the government that it just wants to throw some Jell-O at the wall and see if it sticks, so that at least we are seen to be doing our job here in advance of an election, there is some rational for that in politics, but I think we had better try to get this right and I have concerns on the technical side as to whether this is going to pass muster.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, the member makes a very valid comment. This is a very complex bill. It is 69 pages in length, I believe, and it is very important that parliamentarians do their due diligence.

Again, I talked about the do-not-call registry. What is important is that they fully study the aspects of this bill and look at the impact on business, on workers and on Canadian citizens, to make sure that there is no inadvertent impact.

The member across was quite correct when I talked about the voter identification bill. There was a bill that essentially prevented about a million rural voters from voting. That is an unintended consequence, unless of course there was a Machiavellian plan to cut off rural voters, which I am sure there was not.

We do not want to have a bill that has an impact that we did not foresee, so it is very important that the committee does its due diligence. It is a responsibility as a parliamentarian, when we are examining legislation, to do a 360° review. We need to make sure that this legislation is actually going to do what it is supposed to do and that it has the resources.

I talked about enforcement. It is meaningless if we put measures in a bill and do not devote the resources to making sure it can happen. We see that enforcement problem in other pieces of legislation. The do-not-call registry was a good example of it.

I would argue that it is incumbent upon parliamentarians to take the time to look at the bill, to make sure we understand what its impact would be, and to define some of those vague terminologies that were not quite clear on how we are going to enforce them or patrol them.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on the question by the member of the Liberal Party.

In around 2000 I had the good fortune in Manitoba to be the coordinator to bring in the electronic commerce act, which was the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada at the time. We put in a consumer provision for residents to be reimbursed by credit card companies if they purchased a product or service online and they did not receive it. At the time, there were only two or three states in the United States that had such a provision.

I am not sure whether it would be under this bill, but I wonder whether consumer legislation like that could be added to this bill.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate that the member is very aware of the need for consumer protection in any number of areas, including for airline passengers. He has done some very good work in that area.

Anything we can do to protect consumers is important. I would expect that when this bill goes to committee, one of the things that people will be looking at is consumer protection. Often consumers unwittingly end up on lists, whether they are credit card lists or other kinds of mailing lists, and their names get distributed all over the place. I would urge the committee to look at consumer protection as an aspect of this bill.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Before resuming debate, it is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Don Valley East, Employment Insurance; the hon. member for Mississauga East—Cooksville, The Economy.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak in support of Bill C-27, the electronic commerce protection act. The key reason is that for eight years I operated my own business out of my home like thousands of other Canadians. I can say from first-hand experience that spam is bad news.

High speed Internet communication by email has become the predominant communication tool worldwide. It is the greatest enabler in the information age for small business and the self-employed. It allows thousands of small-business operators and the self-employed in every province to start their businesses and operate them at a profit. That includes writers, people in public relations, journalists, photographers, engineers, lawyers, event managers, fundraisers and many other occupations.

Email and high speed Internet allow thousands of disabled persons to operate businesses and to work from home. It creates almost a level playing field in that situation for disabled persons. It is an incredibly valuable tool for the disabled to communicate with business people and their family and friends.

Parents benefit hugely from home offices and email. The Internet has been a boon to parents who choose to stay at home with infants and children, which my wife and I have done in the past. They want to work in the evenings or do their email during their children's nap time or playtime if they have infants, as does my friend in Oakville, who operates a home business and is a mother as well. She has a little one-and-a-half-year-old. She can do them simultaneously. She is connected by her notebook computer to her clients, associates and, in fact, the world.

Aside from the travel costs, the most important common denominator and resource for self-employed people in small business is their time. I would suggest that time for the self-employed and small business people is actually priceless. It is almost a currency. When someone or some organization, without any invitation or permission and with no previous business relationship, at a very little incremental cost that is too small to measure, sucks up that time by using trickery and stealth marketing to steal that time with spam, it should be stopped.

Unsolicited, unlimited junk mail trying to sell people watches and many other products of very dubious value should also be stopped. Forwarding fraudulent messages designed to dupe innocent people and cheat them out of their savings should be stopped. For example, I would expect most of the people in the House today have received an email from a prince in Nigeria who only needs a little bit of money to get out of prison and is willing to share his resources for the rest of his life. The sad part is that if enough of those emails are sent out and enough mud is thrown against the wall, somebody will respond and somebody will be duped.

The key problem is that in normal marketing and in normal business, the legitimate kind, those wishing to sell goods and services are restrained to reasonable efforts by cost. It costs money to send letters, to make phone calls, to place ads and to get the attention of consumers and other businesses. In fact, the average cost for a letter is 70 cents to a dollar. However, on the Internet, the cost per contact for spam is actually too small to measure. It is not even pennies. Technology, which is our greatest tool, is also subject to abuse.

The Internet is a precious resource. Effectively it belongs to all of us. As subscribers to telephone and Internet services, we pay a fair amount and we are allowed fair usage. Millions of Canadians rely on the telecommunications network to conduct business. They move goods across continents and the oceans. They keep industry moving to help provide thousands of jobs in thousands of businesses. We share this resource, the Internet, to our mutual benefit.

However, there are limits to this shared network. The network cannot carry an unlimited number of messages. People who have ever tried to call their mother on Mother's Day might have had a busy signal, because that happens to be the busiest day of the year on the telephone network. If they try again and again, they will finally get through. Christmas morning and New Year's Eve are similar. There is a limit to the network.

When a relatively few companies, often not owned or operated by Canadians, send out millions of unwanted and unwelcome messages, they utilize more than their fair share of the network. They use a proportion of resources they have not paid for in fairness and they slow down or stop the email messages everyone else is trying to send or receive. They rob us again of more of our time. These spam senders suffer no significant costs when they send out thousands of emails and demonstrate a wanton disregard for the time of others.

Unfortunately, they are some of the most clever and seedy people on the planet. They devise ways to interrupt our shared network and waste the time of thousands of business people. It is very difficult to put a value on that time, but it is certainly in the millions of dollars. They pitch some products that few people would ever buy. It gets worse.

Recently, my own PC network adviser, Paul Lebl, explained to me that these spammers have developed viruses or worms. The emails have very deceptive subject lines and if the wrong email is opened, the virus or worm will search the hard drive and find every email address on the hard drive and send the spam to every one of those email addresses as well. It is a very insidious practice. I view it as vandalism and it has to be deterred or stopped.

No one is saying that this legislation is going to end all spam in Canada or worldwide, but it will help us work with other countries to reduce spam worldwide. It is about improving Canada's competitiveness in the electronic marketplace as well as protecting Canadian consumers from the most dangerous types of spam. Boosting the competitiveness of our economy and protecting Canadians are two primary priorities of our Conservative government.

Since taking office a little over three years ago, our government has taken action to improve the competitiveness of Canadian companies and of our economy as a whole. Budget 2009 continued to create a competitive advantage which will drive our economy forward for years to come.

We are taking steps to enhance our traditional industries with new knowledge and to create opportunities for the development of new industries.

While our economy obviously faces significant challenges as a result of the dramatically reduced demand in the United States, the proactive initiatives of this government have lessened the blow. The good news is we are positioned to come out of this crisis faster than other countries.

Some members of the House have expressed interest in introducing new taxes and raising existing ones. Our government believes that this would be the wrong approach.

New measures taken by our government have been aimed at improving competition and not just filling government coffers or satisfying special interests.

As mentioned, this bill is about continuing to improve Canada's competitiveness. We are already leading the way in e-commerce, but our online economy is under threat from unsolicited commercial email which undermines consumer confidence and hurts productivity.

The global cost of this unsolicited email, or spam, is estimated at $100 billion a year. Spam costs Canada an estimated $3 billion annually. As has been mentioned, spam represents about 87% of the email traffic around the world at 62 trillion spam emails during that time period.

Spam is a nuisance. It undermines competitiveness and it puts Canadians at risk. Our proposed electronic commerce protection act would deter the most dangerous forms of spam, like identity theft, phishing and spyware. It would help drive spammers out of Canada and allow us to work with our international partners to pursue spammers outside the country.

As usual, our Conservative government is taking action to protect consumers and businesses. We are not just talking. We are acting. This initiative will mean a lot to individuals and to businesses. Individuals will be more confident when they choose to shop online. Businesses will be able to more effectively protect their brand and their online reputation while improving their productivity.

As well as being consistently committed to competitiveness, our Conservative government has always believed in acting when people break the rules. This bill is accompanied by significant and tangible penalties. Offences carry fines of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for businesses. Spammers beware.

There are a number of other aspects of this issue which I want to quickly highlight before I conclude.

First, the bill covers text messaging or cellphone spam. The provisions in the bill are not limited to certain types of technology. They target all spam and will continue to be relevant as technology evolves.

Second, this will not affect legitimate or responsible businesses that contact customers or potential customers who have signalled their desire to be contacted.

Third, this approach has been implemented in many other countries with substantial success. Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. have passed strong domestic laws combatting spam, similar to this one. In Australia, for example, the spam act significantly reduced the country's proportion of global spam. Some Australian spammers shut down altogether.

Unfortunately, the bill would not eliminate spam altogether, but it would serve to deter the most dangerous, destructive and deceptive forms of spam, especially those that facilitate other criminal activities, like identity theft.

Finally, the bill would deliver on a commitment made in our 2008 election platform, I am proud to say. That platform stated:

A re-elected Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper will introduce legislation to prohibit the use of spam (unsolicited commercial email) to collect personal information under false pretences and to engage in criminal conduct. The new law will reduce dangerous, destructive and deceptive email and web site practices, and will establish new fines for those who break the law.

We made a commitment, and we are getting the job done. We are improving competitiveness and we are protecting Canadians.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I would remind the hon. member that it is forbidden to use the names of sitting members in the House. One must refer to them by their title.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, while I have read the bill very carefully, and I listened to my hon. colleague's position on it, the one thing that has been left out is a lot of very legitimate businesses make a lot of money on spam, such as the phone giants.

Every time a spam message goes to some teenager's cellphone, the teenager has to pay. The spammer does not get paid, the phone giants get paid. Kids, with their little cellphone accounts, have no ability to stop these spammers. The messages come in and they have to pay, month after month.

I would think it would be incumbent upon us, if we are truly to protect people from spam, to put into the legislation that the phone giants cannot make backhanded money off people who are dependent on their phones and get hit by these spammers.

Does the member not think it would be prudent for us to say that there should not be charges levied against people who are innocently victims of spam?

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, I presume when the member talks about the phone giants, he means the large telecommunications companies. I think what he is talking about is young people who already are paying, competitively compared to worldwide, too much for their cellphone bills are now paying too much for unsolicited messages.

That is part of the benefit of the bill. As spam reduces, young people will get fewer unsolicited emails and those bills will go down.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, Internet security has been an emerging business, growing very rapidly over the last number of years now because of issues such as this.

Ten years ago the Manitoba government had security people earning $100,000 a year. We could not keep them because the banks were hiring them at more than double the price. This has been the effect of not having legislation in place all these years, allowing these spammers to be running free in our market.

The question really comes back to how committed the Conservative government is to this, beyond getting a nice press release out and some good coverage, like they did on the do-not-call legislation last year, but then doing very little enforcement?

It is incumbent upon us to tighten the noose around the government as much as we can to make certain that it has no option to get out of enforcing a very strong act.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to point out what I mentioned in my remarks earlier, and that is the bill is accompanied by significant penalties.

Offences carry fines of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for businesses. These are not cost of doing business fines. These are very significant fines. Working in conjunction with authorities in the other parts of the world, where the Internet is getting clogged with spam and people's time is being wasted, we think they will be quite effective.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Madam Speaker, I was talking earlier about the do-not-call list. Page 56 of Bill C-27 talks about repealing sections 41(1) to 41(7) of the act, and that has to do with the do-not-call registry. Could the member comment on the fact that we saw some pretty serious problems with enforcement with the do-not-call registry and the do-not-call list?

I mentioned the fact that the first level of complaint was Bell. If Bell determined there was a valid complaint, it would then be referred to the CRTC. The CRTC issued 70 warning letters and levied no fines in relation to the do-not-call registry, even though the ability to levy a fine was within the act.

The fines in this legislation are much more serious. However, could the member specifically comment on the requirement for enforcement and what he sees as being important aspects of that enforcement?

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, enforcement is a matter of the words of the bill and the regulations in the bill and how the various parties want to enforce it.

It should be noted that the electronic commerce protection act will not abolish the do-not-call list. I think the member might be aware of that. There are published reports to that effect, and it is not true.

For greater certainty, there is a section of the bill that remains dormant until it is made law by an order-in-council and by regulation.

Section 6.7 of the electronic commerce protection act carves out telemarketing and interactive voice communications to be treated differently, but it does not repeal the do-not-call list.

On the matter of enforcement, I understand the bill is going to committee. There will be discussion at committee and we look forward to hearing the comments of the other parties on how that might be achieved.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I hope we will get the bill to committee. I have heard from the member and the parliamentary secretary that there is no power to cancel the do-not-call registry. Yet sections 41.1 to 41.7 of the act is the do-not-call registry.

Either the Conservatives are slipping it in the bill or they are not sure it is in the bill. Maybe they want to work with us at committee and go through the bill. I would be very wary about us going too far out front on giving our imprimatur to a bill that clearly is doing something the members are telling us it is not.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to reassure the member opposite that there is no intention to repeal the do-not-call list.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, why, then, is it in the bill? Should we strike it now before we send it to committee?

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will go over it again for the member. The electronic commerce protection act does not abolish the do-not-call list. Clause 6.7 carves out telemarketing by exempting interactive voice communications, facsimiles and voice recordings to telephone accounts from the application of the act.

The provision at the end of the bill, which is clause 86, allows for the repeal of the do-not-call list at the time of the government's choosing in the future. It does not repeal the list. It leaves the door open for greater certainty. Clause 86 will remain dormant until the government chooses to enact it by order-in-council.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am very glad we finally dragged it out of the hon. member. It is in the bill, but it is not in the bill unless the government decides to enact it, so we would be giving the government the power to do that. The Conservatives have told the House again and again that it is not there, but now we finally see it is there, but they will only enact it when they choose to enact it.

Again, why is it in the bill? Why does the government not at least have the guts to come out and say that it completely blew it on the registry. It had no enforcement plan. This has been a complete debacle.

Now the Conservatives are slipping it in the bill and whenever they feel comfortable, they will remove it. Why not just tell the House of Commons that they blew it and they have to fix it? They put it in an anti-spam bill and they do not want to say that.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is worth going back to the purpose of the act. The intention of the proposed electronic commerce protection act is to reduce the most damaging and deceptive forms of spam and other computer-related threats that discourage the use of electronic commerce and undermine personal privacy. It will address spam that is malicious in content, those emails that attempt to lure Canadians into fraudulent transactions or counterfeit websites.

A recent scheme, of which the member may be aware, was the UPS re-shipping fraud scam. A fraudulent company, posing as UPS, sent out a spam in an attempt to lure individuals into receiving shipments and sending that shipment, which would usually be overseas, to a second party in turn for payment. Of course the payment never came.

The bill would provide tools for businesses and network providers to better protect the networks on which we purchase products and do our banking. It would provide better protection for our personal information online and prohibit the bulk sharing and compilation of electronic addresses.

I hope that helps the member.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am very glad to rise to speak to this somewhat bizarre bill.

It is very clear that the government is setting up a bill to kill the do-not-call registry. It is talking about fraud. It is talking about fax machines. We push the government on question after question, and it tells us that just because it is in there does not mean it is actually in there. Then it asks us to speed the bill through. I would be very concerned about rushing through a bill brought forward by the Conservative government without doing due diligence.

Legislation is like trying to push a glacier. It is very cumbersome. People want to develop legislation for this, that or the other, and they tell us we have to have a law. Then we put in a law and we see the concerns. Any time the Conservatives try to bring in a law, they start howling up and down that the opposition are not willing to push it through right away. It tells us we are soft on crime because we do want to actually study a bill on mandatory minimums for furniture theft or whatever else they bring forward.

There are all kinds of booby traps in legislation. Legislation always has unintended consequences. If we do not do the due diligence, we end up using a hammer to whack a bunch of little pieces all over the place without necessarily getting what we wanted.

When we look at a bill, it has to be focused, and it to be focused right. So what are we focused on right now? The bill is focused on the issue of spam.

Is spam a problem? Spam is a big problem. Spam is a problem on two or three different levels. It is an irritant, number one. I get it all the time on my BlackBerry. There is a woman in some cafe who is waiting to meet me and she thinks I look great. This woman who emails me never has my first name. I go on my BlackBerry and someone is selling me products to make certain parts of my body bigger than they need to be. Then I go on my BlackBerry and someone is selling me a beautiful condo on a malaria-infested swamp. Those are irritants, and so I erase them. Sure it costs me a bit of time, but it is not that big a deal.

The bigger problem with spam is the use of it to defraud people across the world. Of course we know about the Nigerian 419 scam. When I ran my magazine, in the days when the fax machine was cutting-edge technology, we got these faxes from Nigeria or Bosnia, or wherever there was a crisis, from someone trying to get out of the country who needed some money. If we gave them money, we would get money back. Everybody knows the 419 scam. But it was cumbersome. It was slow. It had to be done on fax machines. It actually cost them money to do it, so they had to limit the number of scams they could get away with. Surprisingly, a lot of people got snagged in these kinds of frauds.

However, when we moved to digital technology, the ability of these fraud artists anywhere in the world to inundate millions and millions of Internet subscribers with fraudulent claims jumped astronomically, and the costs for doing it became almost nothing.

The vast majority of us look at those fraud emails, and we might be a little upset or we might laugh at them, and we erase them. However, they only need one in a thousand people or one in ten thousand people to succeed. People have lost their savings. There have been senior citizens who have been defrauded, or young people who have lost money. It is so hard to track these fraud artists down. An international effort is needed to deal with them. We have to be able to root these players out, and we have to be get them off our servers.

The other major problem with spam is the use of spyware technology and the use of Trojans, the malignant attempt to destroy people's personal or office computers. That is a level of destruction in our corporate economy that no jurisdiction should be willing to put up with. For all too long in Canada we have sat back and said it is the cost of doing business. However, it should not be the cost of doing business. We need a very clear set of laws to go after spammers, especially given the ability of spam artists to burrow into our computers, take our lists and reproduce them, or use our computers to send spam further and further afield.

The issue is that we need spam legislation. The New Democratic Party will be supporting spam legislation going to committee to ensure we have the tools to shut these operators down.

That being said, there needs to be due diligence. We need to look at this bill carefully, because it is a very large and cumbersome bill. There are a number of elements of this bill that are concerning. They really relate to how the Conservative government bungled the do-not-call registry.

We will go back to the do-not-call registry at a further point. But the idea behind the registry was great. That is how many laws are started. People phone an MP's office and say they are sick and tired of people calling them at home every day and they want something done about it. The government says, “Everyone is upset. We are going to act on it. We are going to have a do-not-call registry”.

Then we look at what happened with the do-not-call registry. The glaring gaps left millions of people who trusted in it exposed.

When there are unknown firms with cryptic names, such as “my broker office”, paying $50 so they can purchase all the numbers on that list in Toronto, we have a big problem. And when the CRTC allows companies with very dubious names to download those lists, we have a big problem.

When I am at work and I see a phone number on my BlackBerry and somebody is selling me a dodgy vacation in the Cayman Islands, I am thinking about how they got my parliamentary phone number. I think back to someone, somewhere paying $50 to get the list of all the Canadian phone numbers. That is a huge glaring problem.

Of course I could stand here and beat up on the Conservative government for completely blowing the registry and not thinking about it, but I am not going to do that. I am going to say that it meant well. Legislation is difficult. It set up a registry because it was responding to a problem. But there were gaping holes in it, and now we have a bigger problem.

The problem was that the lists were left open and all kinds of dodgy operations got access to them. Who knows where they are? They are not subject to Canadian law. They could be calling, for pennies, from anyplace around the world. We are stuck.

Our consumers are being exposed to fraudulent claims. I do not know how many times I have been told that the warranty on my car is just about done. Obviously they have never seen my Pontiac Sunfire or they would know the warranty was done on that a long, long time ago.

The other problem with the do-not-call registry is the enforcement mechanism. The government turned it over to the CRTC. The CRTC deals with just about everything under the sun. Being on the heritage committee, I am not going to beat up on the CRTC, but it can barely keep track of all the broadcast issues and the telecommunications issues.

The CRTC has the job of policing the do-not-call registry. Twenty thousand complaints a month are brought forward. As my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan put forward, Bell reviews those and decides which are the serious ones and which are not. Many of those get tossed out. I am not saying that Bell is tossing out the ones that might implicate itself, but at the end of the day there have been only 70 letters sent out calling for “corrective action”.

Of the 308 members in this House of Commons, how many have received dodgy phone calls from which this list is supposed to protect them? I bet there are 70 right here alone. Then we add our family members and people who phone our constituency offices and there are a lot more than 70 people who have had reason to complain.

For all the registry's hoopla, we have allowed millions of names to be siphoned off by fraud artists. There have been only 70 letters calling for corrective action. That is a big issue. It is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Talking about the complete failure of the phone registry brings us back to Bill C-27. There is one view that Bill C-27 might try to change the registry by saying there is an opt-in clause as opposed to an opt-out clause, that Canadians would not have to receive a message from anybody unless they have given prior consent.

This is where I have a problem with the enforceability of the bill. Requiring someone to get prior consent before they contact people, I think in the digital age is going to prove almost impossible. There might be people, who are not very active in the digital world, who do not want to be called unless they call the other people first, but the vast majority of transactions are happening without prior consent.

This is where we get into some real problems with the enforceability of the act. If we try to draw too wide a net on spammers, we are going to get caught up with a whole bunch of business transactions. Some of them are very legitimate and some are less so, but will we get to the spammers? I am concerned about this. I think we need to bring this to committee to hear from witnesses on how practical that provision would be.

If the government brings in an opting-in clause rather than an opting-out clause in this spammer's bill, then conceivably the opt-out clause for the phone registry would not be needed any more. Contrary to what the Conservative Party is telling us, on page 56, clause 86 says that sections 41.1 to 41.7 of the act would be repealed. That is the do-not-call registry.

We are being assured, after many, many questions to the Conservative ranks, that repealing the do-not-call registry is not the same as repealing the do-not-call registry. We would only repeal the do-not-call registry if it becomes law and then we decide to enact it.

We are being asked, as opposition members, to quickly push this legislation through so that once again we show we are tough on spammers. If it is in this legislation, then why not say it is in this legislation? Why not say we had a problem with the phone registry, we blew it and it is not working. The opt-out clause does not work so we are going for an opt-in clause. Put that on the table. The Conservatives did not do that. They have hidden it in the microscopic print.

That is not the way to enact legislation. Legislation is not hiding things in a bill and then calling on the opposition members to quickly vote for it to show they are supporting the government. We need to make sure this legislation will work.

The idea of multi-million dollar fines for major spam fraudsters is a perfectly reasonable solution. If we are going after the malignant spyware out there, we need serious criminal penalities. That has to be in the bill. The NDP supports that.

The problem, again, goes back to the dodgy way the phone registry played out with enforcement. Can we really expect that the CRTC, with its inability to respond to the 20,000 calls a month it got about the phone registry, is going to have the tools to go after these operators? That is the question.

I suggest that we need to look at thinning the bill down, making sure our legal teams have the clear mandate to go after the people we really need to go after, draw the net a little smaller and make sure we can do this under police powers. We are never going to get the spam cleared up until we have a way of enforcing it. At the end of the day it is very bulky, slow moving legislation that ends up being challenged in the courts. We support moving forward with this legislation, but it has to be done right.

In my time, I have seen many bills crafted in the House and passed with many nods, only to reveal a month or six months down the road that we did not see something.

For example, there was the voter registration bill. It went through once. New Democrats certainly were raising a hue and cry about problems with the bill at that time and a million rural people were disenfranchised. The bill had to be brought back a second time and there were still problems with it. We had legal experts and student organizations which said that, if we do not make the proper changes, hundreds of thousands of people will be disenfranchised and it will be subject to a court challenge. Now we have Elections Canada looking at that bill right now that had become law and it will probably be subject to a court challenge, which means it would come back for legislation again.

If we were in the private sector and did such a bad job once, twice and we were looking at it three times, everyone would get fired. Here, we just wait until it comes back to committee. I do not think that is a good enough way to do business.

On the issue of spam, of all the issues we argue about in the House of Commons, we can all agree no one likes spam. We can all agree that we want to be able to go after the fraud artists, but where we might diverge is on whether or not we rush through legislation that is not thought out.

So, we will support this going to committee. We want to see a bill that is enforceable, that hits the targets that it needs, and that it does not reproduce the debacle of the phone registry that started out as a good idea, but never delivered the goods.