Mr. Speaker, it is appearing more and more that our Conservative colleagues opposite are really not debaters; they are voters. They come into the House and follow the lead of their House leader and whip.
There surely are in this bill some debatable concerns. One should not pretend that this bill would solve the problems outlined, even prohibiting these various anti-social activities. The bill would never succeed in eradicating those activities. The bill comes across more as a threat to those who might do it, certainly those in Canada, even if we got all of the institutions and players in Canada to be good boy scouts, which I expect will happen. We have a good reputation around the world for this kind of thing once we regulate or prohibit.
I suspect that our friends around the world, even in the United States of America, Europe and everywhere, will not pay any attention to this at all. They will take every opportunity to continue what they are doing for profit or whatever other motive.
At the end of the day, any tangible global initiative to eradicate, reduce and restrict is going to involve treaties. Whether it starts at the UN or some other mechanism, I would encourage it. However, before we even take that step, it is really important for us to get our legislation right in Canada and understand the difference between all the freedoms we have and the privacies that are protected.
I did not get a chance to go into the definition of commercial activity, but it is important to get the definitions right so that individuals remain as free as they can be in this country and, at the same time, restrict the institutional, business and corporate activity that involves spam and unauthorized collections of personal data. It is treaties that will ultimately be the foundation and groundwork of future successful regulation, in my view.