Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the debate. I am speaking to Motion No. 4, an amendment which I put to the legislation.
I am confident that this amendment will have the support of all sides of the House. I look forward to the report stage vote to see whether indeed all members support Motion No. 4, if I may advertise it.
I believe my amendment addresses one of the nastier problems in society, the problem of fundraising and donor lists being sold and bartered across various organizations leading to immense quantities of junk mail that we all receive and everyone is inflicted with.
I live in a village in central Canada. Just a few weeks ago I received an unsolicited phone call. It was from a woman asking me to donate to I think it was the wheelchair handicap society. I asked her where she was calling from and she said that she was calling from Halifax. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the weather, then I asked her how she got my name, seeing that I was in central Canada, and she said that I was on her list.
My amendment addresses the issue of how I came to be on that list and how people, how relatives and how senior citizens come to be on lists where they receive unwanted solicitations, unsought solicitations and solicitations that often cost them a great deal of money.
Now for the evidence, and I have evidence. For instance, I have here before me an Internet bulletin that was directed toward the Canadian Direct Marketing Association. It quotes a broker for direct market lists. This person says that some of the best lists to get hold of if one wants to sell a product by direct marketing or telemarketing are for example The Economist , The Financial Post , Scientific American or Télémédia, or the Wellness Letter .
We can say fine, the legislation as it exists does cover organizations such as those because they are commercial organizations and consequently they will be required to obey the provisions in this privacy act. However, this individual is advising fundraising organizations, primarily charities. He went on to say that he feels that organizations should also consider renting their donor lists because it is already happening in the U.S.A. He cites the American Lung Association, Greenpeace and the March of Dimes.
That article appeared on the Internet in 1995. I can imagine that a great deal of progress has been made in Canada toward organizations, charities and non-profit organizations, selling their lists without, I would point out, the consent of the people who have contributed to those organizations.
Indeed by coincidence, I have a proposal from a direct marketing firm in Maryland, U.S.A. to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which is a Canadian charity. This is a proposal on how the organization, if it can get the donor list of MADD Canada, can sell to that list with various advantages to MADD Canada. In fact MADD Canada does not have to put up any money. There is a procedure whereby the telemarketer covers its costs before the charity receives the benefit of the telemarketing campaign.
There is an interesting clause. This is a letter of intent. This organization called Creative Direct Response Inc. of Maryland is proposing to MADD that ownership of a client's donor file, that is the list of donors, shall be vested exclusively in MADD Canada at all times. That sounds good. Then it goes on to say that MADD Canada agrees that while the file is theirs at all times, CDR has a lien against MADD Canada's donor file until all mailing lists outlined above are paid up in full. What is a lien? A lien is possession. It is a payment. It is obtaining something for pay, for barter. Barter.
I also happen to have a list of some of the Canadian organizations that have dealt with Creative Direct Response Inc. of the United States. We have to assume that these organizations have come to some sort of agreement similar to what was offered to MADD Canada. It is called the Canadian exchange list summary.
Of course, when we are talking about exchange, we are not necessarily talking about the exchange of money. We are talking about the exchange of lists for the purposes of making money. I think the term that would cover that is barter. They are bartering something.
Here is an example of some of the organizations that have bought into this arrangement with Creative Direct Response Inc. of the United States. We have here the Canadian Association of the Deaf, the Canadian Blind Sports Association, the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Corporate Donors. I wonder how they got that list and I wonder if the corporate donors know they are on the list. There is also the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies and so on.
And what do we have here? We have the B.C. NDP as well, and if I turn the page, we have the Ontario NDP. Those are two political parties. I have to be fair here because we can also find the Ontario Liberals. We have to be careful that we do not throw stones around here, because I think if one examined the donor lists, the exchange lists of other telemarketing organizations, one would find pretty well all the political parties.
The point of all this is that these names are appearing on these lists without the knowledge of the people who are actually contributing to the organizations. The situation is that one may give money or take out a membership in a union or a political party or some other type of organization and that organization may be selling that list to other organizations. Indeed they may be selling that list abroad to the United States.
I must hasten to add incidentally that MADD Canada did not go through with the deal. That is very praiseworthy of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I would only wish that the many organizations on this list I was citing had shown the same type of prudence, shall we say, and responsibility as MADD Canada and not gotten into this type of arrangement.
At any rate with the bill itself, I am going to explain briefly how my amendment works. If we look through the bill we will find that clause 16 gives the penalties that exist in the bill. Basically, it says the court has the option of awarding damages to whoever complains under the conditions of the bill, including damages for humiliation the complainant has suffered. That may be very important when it comes to unwanted solicitations.
We are working backward. The next section that is relevant is schedule 1 in the bill. It describes principally what the bill does. It states what the terms of privacy are that must be fulfilled by the various organizations covered by the bill. I think the most important principle in this bill that is covered in schedule 1 is the idea that when organizations use personal information, they must get the consent of the people they are getting that information from. That is very clearly spelled out in schedule 1, section 4.3.1.
The section just above that also stresses in the case of mailing lists, which is what I was just talking about, organizations providing the list should be expected to obtain consent before disclosing the list of personal information to other organizations.
Then we come to my amendment. It amends in clause 2 the definition “commercial activity” which means any particular transaction, act or conduct that is of a commercial character and adds the words “including the selling, bartering or leasing of donor, membership or other fundraising lists”. Checkmate.
