Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague asked an excellent question. Clearly, from his work in terms of trying to protect consumer interests, he has come to see a pattern, which is that the Conservatives are all talk when it comes to protecting individuals, but they draw up a big zero when it comes to serious issues such as, for example, credit cards and credit card fees, and companies that rip off people, especially senior citizens and people on fixed incomes.
Regarding the issue of this spam bill, this bill should have been law a year ago and we are not even there yet. The government seems to be intent on watering down the bill. After having made the announcement that it was going to do something about spam, I think it felt a bit of push-back from its corporate lobbyists and backers, basically the people in the back rooms who pretty much write the ticket for the government.
We are still seeing huge problems with the issue of phishing. People's personal information is being fraudulently garnered on a large scale. Our senior citizens especially are increasingly vulnerable to this. They are being ripped off and have no place to turn. We do not see a government ombudsman out there protecting senior citizens from credit card fraud. Their information is being stolen on the net and they are being left to fend for themselves against some very large international players, players who can hardly even be tracked down. Because of their practice of taking over third-party computers, they could be in any jurisdiction in the world. Canada obviously needs to play a larger international role.
Canada is certainly embarrassing itself on the international stage. I do not see that the government is very focused on the international role right now.
There needs to be a serious criminal law element and there need to be resources. We can bring in all the criminal laws we want but there need to be resources to ensure that the fraud squads have power. They have to be able to keep up with their criminal competition. Every single day that we are in this House debating, they are actually evolving, changing and covering their tracks.
Senior citizens, people on fixed incomes, people who are open to fraud are left to fend for themselves. The government has left a very large hole.