Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question and for his support of my bill.
He raises an excellent point. In fact, I consulted many Canadians and held information sessions about my bill. I also tried to make both young and old people realize what happens to our personal information when we put it online. Many were very surprised to hear just how widely their personal information is used, and for what purposes. In many cases, it is used in ways people never agreed to.
We do have an existing legislation: the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act is meant to protect Canadians against unauthorized disclosures of information and other similar problems. However, that legislation is being broken, and therein lies the problem.
Many firms offering Web services are simply huge, which means these issues are becoming more and more international in scope. Unfortunately, these firms do not always comply with Canadian laws.
I believe that as parliamentarians, we have a duty to implement modern protections that both young and old Internet users will be aware of. They will then be protected as the law intended, instead of seeing the law not being followed, as is sadly the case today.