Mr. Speaker, it is very difficult to hold senders of spam accountable for their mass mailings. We all know that the barrier to entry is very low. Spammers are numerous and the volume of unsolicited mail has become astronomically high in the country. We have already heard the figure of some two billion spam messages a day in Canada alone.
The cost of spam should not be underestimated in lost productivity and fraud. Those costs are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with that deluge. A recent study from California demonstrated how spammers profited from their activities by shifting the costs traditionally borne by marketers to the recipients of spam, which are namely Internet providers and Internet users.
My hon. colleague has already commented on the need to have tough sanctions to deal with this, which I think is quite positive in many respects. However, there is an absence in the bill of any criminal sanction. Could he tell us what his feelings are with respect to having criminal sanctions added to the bill so we can ensure we can deal with this problem?
With civil penalties, the people have to be found. Many are companies that are set up in houses or in the cyber world. We may have no real ability to track them down. We may be unable to get at their assets. In fact, they may have no assets. Civil action against entities like that simply will not work.
Could the member comment further on the need for criminal sanctions as a real means of getting at this problem?