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NDP MP for Timmins—James Bay (Ontario)

Won his last election, in 2021, with 35% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Copyright Modernization Act November 2nd, 2010

Madam Speaker, I was listening to the back and forth between the minister and the Liberal critic on what was exactly under the digital lock, and I noticed my colleague, the minister, did one of those wonderful sleight of hands that the Conservatives do on this. He is telling us all about how great the mash-up thing is as long as there is no digital lock, and if there is a digital lock, then we cannot touch any of the rights that we would otherwise have.

In this bill, the government offers a whole series of rights that nobody can exercise if it is in the digital realm. The fair dealing rights can only be accessed if there is not a digital lock on it. The mash-up rights can only be accessed if there is not a digital lock. The government says that this is to bring them into compliance with WIPO, but in fact under article 10 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, it says that the protection measures cannot override the rights that would otherwise exist, so that the rights that exist within this bill cannot be overridden by an adjunct measure, which is the technological protection measures.

I would like to ask the Liberal Party if it would be willing to work to amend this legislation so that the rights that are guaranteed to citizens can be legally accessed, and separate that, as my colleague the minister had said earlier, from people who would break a digital lock in order to steal works and put it on BitTorrent. It is a distinction that is recognized by numerous other countries that are WIPO compliant.

Does he think it is possible for Canada to understand and make this distinction?

Petitions November 2nd, 2010

Mr. Speaker, winter is coming and our heating bills are starting to go up in northern Ontario. In fact, just this week we have had a number of people in our office who are concerned. Not surprisingly, they have brought forward petitions about the regressive HST and how it is affecting people, particularly people on fixed incomes and people in rural areas who need to heat with older heating units. The government, of course, has cancelled the energy retrofit program that would have helped many of these families.

The petitioners are calling upon the government to stop punishing northern and rural residents with this regressive tax, the HST.

National Philanthropy Day Act October 21st, 2010

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an incredible honour for me to stand in this House as a representative of the people of the region of Timmins—James Bay. I am proud to speak on behalf of the New Democratic Party tonight on Bill S-203, National Philanthropy Day Act.

There is a false philosophy that I think has corrupted much of our world in the last century, a philosophy that says people only do things out of self-interest. We see that with the great social heretic Ayn Rand and her belief that greed was good, that if people were greedy the world would somehow be a better place, and this idea of enlightened self-interest that people are somehow helping the world by looking out for number one, and of course, the people who fall by the wayside are left to fall by the wayside.

We know this argument is flawed on so many different levels, because people do so much without a thought of self-interest. In fact, I would argue that people are fundamentally motivated to do and to change the world, and to help their neighbour because they feel compelled to do it, not just because they feel good about it and not because it makes them feel somehow better but because it is what is in our fundamental DNA as human beings.

Whenever there is an issue, whenever there is a crisis, we will see the goodness of human beings, and I would say, the goodness of human beings overriding sometimes the more negative aspects of human beings.

In my riding of Timmins—James Bay, whenever there is a house fire, the neighbours come together. They start to look out for each other. In fact, I have found that the poorer the community, often the more people are willing to give.

This is the desire, perhaps, for us to examine the issue of a philanthropy day. I am not quibbling with the idea behind this motion; the only question I would have is that I do not think many people would consider themselves philanthropists.

“Philanthropy” comes from the original Greek words, and there are various Greek words for love or for care. There is “eros”, which we would use as “erotic”, the physical form of love. There is “philo”, which becomes philanthropy. There is the other word for love, which is “agape”, which is a much deeper, spiritual, religious love. Philanthropy comes from this original Greek word.

What it has come to mean, specifically within our culture, is the certain class of people who give from their excess, the millionaires and billionaires, as one member referred to. My colleague from Alberta said this should not be a day just about recognition of millionaires and billionaires, it should be a recognition of all those who give. That is certainly something I think we can all agree on.

However, the term “philanthropist” does, by its general nature, exclude everyone who gives. It has a much more specific meaning. If we were looking to talk about everyone who gives, perhaps we would call it “national help your neighbour day”.

The philanthropist tradition is certainly known in the United States, probably more so than anyplace else. In the 19th century, there were the great billionaires, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Guggenheims. Anybody who has ever been to New York City will see the immense wealth of these mass, giant capitalist families. After a certain point of building their industries, they started to put their wealth into philanthropic organizations.

In my region of Timmins—James Bay, we have a Carnegie library in the town of New Liskeard. There is a Carnegie library in Sudbury. The Guggenheims did a phenomenal amount of work in terms of bringing modern art to New York. They did that from their position of immense wealth.

To encourage people like the modern-day Rockefellers and ones who are further below them, we have instituted tax credits so that we encourage the wealthy and people with money to put aside some of their wealth. They get usually very impressive tax benefits for doing that. There is a role for that within our society.

It is a role to replace the social fabric of our country, which is becoming more and more tattered every day. I think this is where we see in the United States that they have taken a wrong turn in terms of philanthropy. We now see a new age of great philanthropy in the United States that also very much mirrors the 19th century where there were immense wealth disparities.

There is a book out about how these modern billionaires such as the Gates, the Buffetts and the Bonos who have such immense wealth will somehow save the planet.

It is very similar to the 19th century with the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and that age of philanthropy. At that time, the conditions of average society in America and North America was brutal. We have to be careful about lionizing such a massive wealth gap in our country so that the super rich are somehow seen in this modern theory of being able to save the planet.

That is not to take away, in any way, from the work they are doing. It is immense work. We need to encourage them and ensure that the philanthropists in our society are playing specific roles to better our society. For example, the Gates Foundation plays a role that government does not do.

However, we have to ensure that we do not expect it to replace the existing social fabric that we have developed co-operatively within the country over the last 140 years. This has made Canada very humane country, a country where we have looked out for each other.

We also need to remember, in recognizing the philanthropists, that we have to recognize the fact that people give so much of themselves without the idea of a tax break, without the idea that they will be ever recognized. That is a much more fundamental driver.

For example, when I was 19 years and my ears were as big as they are now, but I was only 120 pounds, I decided there was a much better role for me in the world than going to school. I became involved in a movement called the Catholic Worker Movement. The Catholic Worker Movement was founded by Dorothy Day, the incredible bohemian writer from New York City who worked with the poor. Dorothy inspired generations of young Catholics to get involved and to work with the poor. However, Dorothy had an amazing principle. She said that if people wanted to donate, they could but there would be no tax credits. She felt that everyone who donated should donate because they actually felt it was important to donate as opposed to just because a foundation or a large organization would donate.

I was about 22 when we bought a house in downtown Toronto. I did not have two pennies to put together. People came together and said that they supported it. We bought a house. We had real estate. Every month, people came with donations and wanted to help the work we were doing with men coming out of prisons, with refugees, with people on the street.

In fact, people wanted to help so much that we would come home some days and we could not get in our door because some school would have donated hundreds of bags of clothing. It would take days to figure out what to do with them. People wanted to give. People wanted to make a difference. Any of our members on any side of the House will say that when there is an issue where there is a cause, people will come forward. They do not necessarily see themselves as philanthropists. It is just what they do.

When we move forward with this, and it is a bill to be supported, the work of public foundations and heritage buildings that are handed over by multimillionaires to be part of a public trust or the money set aside from men and women, who would otherwise build themselves an extra fifth, or sixth or seventh house in the Cayman Islands, to be put into some public good or some public project is to be recommended, and we support the issue of tax credits.

We support the role of philanthropy within our society, but we also have to recognize that we are not all philanthropists just because we give. The meaning of it has become much more specific to a group of people who are within that realm whose names appear on the various boards and foundations, the philanthropists who we recognize.

However, let us remember that so much of what makes our country move, so much of what makes our country great and so much of what makes our country look out for those who are falling behind, for those who are hungry and for those who are in prison, comes from the general goodness of the people here, the people there and the people all over who give because they would give anyway without ever thinking their name would appear on a plaque or they would get a tax break. They give because it is what they do.

There needs to be some way to recognize that within our society. I would like to move a motion but I do not know what we would call it. At the end day we would maybe call it national Canadian day because we are a society that cares and we have to continue in that process.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague gave an excellent overview. He has a very long history in dealing with consumer rights issues. The issue of consumer rights go to the very heart of the need for a digital strategy in this country because more and more consumers and businesses are on line. We are in a digital realm where we need broadband and certain levels and standards.

We see the government with its very retrograde of are there no workhouses for the poor approach to government when what we are hearing from small business is that we need standards on broadband. We have none from the government. We are hearing that we need a plan for net neutrality to ensure that the data being transmitted from small business to small business, from consumer to consumer across this country and around the world has protections in place to ensure people who are paying for service are not being ripped off.

Why does my hon. colleague think it is that the government seems so stuck, not even in the 20th century but in the 19th century, with so many of its attitudes. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, whether we look at South Korea, Sweden, Australia or Europe, is moving far ahead of us. The best the government can offer is that in the next year it will spend whatever is left of the debt, whatever money it can borrow, on prisons while everyone else is building international and national standards for broadband.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

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.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, it has become a very clear pattern of how the government will use the levers of power for personal vendettas to attack and attempt to destroy the reputation of critics. It is becoming very disturbing.

The incident that happened during the Copenhagen conference almost slipped by without any real public comment because the media were not paying attention. Government members were getting embarrassed, as they should, by their horrific stand on the tar sands and lack of international commitments, a situation that has obviously come back and bit them with their humiliating vote last week at the UN. However, they went after an ISP provider, serverloft, which responded because the Canadian government told it to shut down sites immediately. In order to do that, it had to interfere with a wide block of ISP server addresses and shut down 4,500 websites of people who were putting up legitimate products and information. It could have been educational resources. These people had their democratic ability to participate in a digital realm interfered with and monkey-wrenched by a government that panicked, was embarrassed and could not seem to deal with any kind of parody from the Yes Men, who are very funny international political comedians.

I would challenge the government. If it believes it can get away with shutting down 4,500 web addresses, then why is it not spending more time with the dictators in Burma and more time with China? It is not sending any kind of message in terms of democratic commitment in a digital age if it will use the levers of government to shut down 4,500 websites in order to get at two hoaxers making fun and making a very fair political parody of the government.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague raises an excellent point. Again, when we are dealing with spam, we are not just dealing with irritating emails we have to spend a lot of time flushing. The fact it does intervene and impedes competitiveness and the ability of businesses to work, it has also become very much tied to cases of international fraud on a massive scale through the use of phishing to the taking over of third party computers.

If we do not have some real and clear punishments for shutting down spam sites, then Canada will continue to be seen as a spam haven. Under the Conservative government, any spam artist in the world knows that the worst he or she will get is a slap on the wrist and a peck on the cheek. The government is more willing to go after 15-year-old punks in Winnipeg and other cities, but international spammers seem to be welcome. The government does not seem to get it when it comes to the importance of dealing with spam and sending a message to spam artists.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured, as always, to rise in this august chamber and speak on behalf of the wonderful people of Timmins—James Bay who have sent me here to represent them.

I will say at the beginning that I have already spoken on this bill. I have already been through the entire rigmarole about this spam legislation and yet, like spam itself, it seems we never get anywhere with the government and its own legislation.

Last session we had a mere three bills actually get through the process. I do not think there has ever been such a pitiful output by any government in the history of this Parliament. Legislation that needs to be addressed is always deep-sixed for whatever are the needs of the PM's war room. In this case, all the work that was done on the anti-spam legislation had to be tossed aside and flushed so that the government could prorogue, because it was starting to feel heat about the Afghan detainees.

The government felt that people would not notice if it turned out the lights on the democratic institution of Canada. We know that the Canadian public was rightfully outraged at the government's decision to knock off work for three months in January and hope nobody would notice.

In doing that, millions of dollars in time spent in hearing testimony, in developing legislation and in debate was lost. So here we are again, dealing with the issue of spam.

I have watched the government for the last five years. It treats the House of Commons as a sideshow. The real work of the government is behind the scenes, in putting their buddies into key positions, in stripping and vandalizing the public institutions of Canada, like the long form census, and in stripping the tax codes so that its friends in big banks and big oil are getting massive breaks while we are going into deficit.

Whatever happens in this House, we have one crime bill after another that is waved out, and the government jumps up and down but it does not ever seem all that serious about actually coming through with anything. I think it is because there is a fundamental contempt for the important work of this House.

I think it is very clear when we see something like the anti-spam legislation. We are the only G8 country without anti-spam legislation. It would not be all that hard to move on it, and I think it would be very important to move on it.

We are not just talking about an inconvenience. We are not just talking about the fact that, on any given day, my personal email has all kinds of offers for Viagra and trips to the Cayman Islands and all kinds of dodgy email requests that I have to flush and erase.

We are talking about a new form of fraud that works on such sheer levels of numbers that they only need to have 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 respond. I am sure that back in the fax machine days, people used to receive the famous Nigerian 419 fraud letters. The frauds originally came out of Nigeria and are now centred in eastern Europe.

Back in the days when the old Nigerian 419 scam was being run, and I am sure everyone saw them, there would be a request from somebody trying to get money out of Sierra Leone, Nigeria or Serbia after the Bosnian war. The scammers would say they would transfer the money into an account set up by other people, and of course those people would have to put up a little bit of cash. That is when people got caught in the fraud.

The old 419 fraud actually took a little bit of effort, and it cost the fraudsters a fair amount of time. They had to work the fax machines. It was random, and it was not all that effective. However, the 419 frauds are internationally known as one of the largest international fraud schemes.

When that can be done through the Internet and when people can actually get control of third-party personal computers through spyware and then start multiplying the requests from hundreds to thousands to millions, a high return is not needed to actually have the phenomenal levels of fraud that are happening, because of the third-party control of computers that takes place. This needs to be dealt with.

I am not singling out senior citizens in particular, but I know a number of senior citizens who have been victims of Internet fraud. It is perhaps because they come from a time when there was more trust in how things were done. Now more bank frauds are taking place and people are sending emails with requests for credit card information, banking information. The Internet is a major source of fraud, so we should be moving ahead with this anti-spam legislation.

Anti-spam legislation should be seen as a part of a larger digital strategy. After four years, the Conservative government has started to learn these words. It says the words “digital strategy”, but when it comes to digital strategy, it is like the Commodore 64. It is not even in the game in terms of a digital strategy.

What would a digital strategy mean for a government that actually cared about moving forward on issues other than minimum sentences for furniture theft or whatever is the latest issue in the crazy crime agenda that it is trying to push?

We need a forward-looking government. The Conservatives have had five years to bring the WIPO treaty forward in the House, five years. That could have been done, and we would have set a number of international standards, for example, the “making available” right.

Canada would not be under pressure in terms of its copyright legislation if we had dealt with the WIPO treaty five years ago. We could have taken the time to institute a good consultation process on copyright. We had one copyright bill, which was widely ridiculed. It looked like a dog's breakfast when it was brought forward, and the Conservatives had to quickly retract it. Now we have another copyright bill. I would like to say I am hopeful, but I am not holding my breath as to whether the government is actually serious about coming through with a copyright bill before the next election. It will be problematic if they do not. There is a certain element of needing to be seen, on the international stage, to be actually taking this seriously.

If we were going to have a digital strategy dealing with the WIPO treaty, dealing with issues like digital locks and making sure not just that we are WIPO compliant but that we are not just foolhardy, the present government's plan with digital locks would actually lock down content unnecessarily and criminalize individuals who have legal rights. For example, librarians or blind people need to be able to access educational works through digital locks. They will be treated the same as an international counterfeiter under the Conservatives, not surprisingly of course because the Conservatives have a dumb-down approach on pretty much everything. A blind student will be treated the same as an international counterfeiter if he or she has to break a digital lock to access digital works.

The Conservatives do not get it on the issue of copyright. They do not get it on the fact that we should have had spam legislation already in the bag and moving forward.

We need a national broadband strategy. Every time the government gets 50 houses hooked onto fibre, government members get up and announce it as some kind of great success. When the Conservatives took office, Canada was the world leader. If we look at the FCC rankings for the OECD countries, Canada was a world leader in broadband penetration. We have fallen further and further behind in terms of cost, access and speed.

A riding like mine is the size of Great Britain. Right now large sections of my riding are still on dial-up. We might as well have crank phones. The government talks about a broadband strategy of 1.5 megabits per second. That is the Conservatives' idea of our being in the 21st century.

Under the labour government, Australia will hook up 93% of Australia. Australia is a good example because it, like Canada, has a small population spread out over a vast territory. Ninety-three per cent of Australia will be hooked up by fibre at a rate of 100 megabits a second. I would like members to think of our ability to compete at 1.5 megabits. The government might as well lock big cannonballs to our feet and tell us to start running. That is the Conservatives' idea of our competing, not to mention what we are going to be up against with Sweden, which is at gigabyte capacity. South Korea is the same.

Canada is being left behind because the Conservative government does not get it. The Conservatives do not want to get it. They believe, in their blind faith, that the free enterprise system will somehow do this for them.

As we have seen in the rural United States and as we are seeing now in Canada, unless we have a government partnership, there is no business case that can be made to hook up large rural regions. There will never be a business case. The only business case the government can make is to say that digital strategy is a national priority in terms of competition, in terms of cultural involvement, in terms of the fundamental civic rights of citizens in a digital age to be able to participate. That comes out of a government vision.

Australia, with the labour government, will hook up 93% at 100 megabits per second in national broadband and the other 7% will be hooked up by wireless so nobody will be left behind.

What we have right now is a government that is adrift, a government that has no plan, for example, for the digital transition in television.

If we look at how the United States government prepared for the transition for digital from analog to digital on television, it had a national plan. The government worked with its regions. It had advertisements. It had workshops in communities to prepare people.

We are about 10 months away from the big switch where the analog signals will go dead and we will switch over to digital. Have we seen anything from our august industry minister on this? Have we heard him say a word? Zero, nada. Perhaps if he spent a little less time running the pork barrel projects into his riding and a little more time on the need to have a national digital strategy, he would be prepared for the digital transition that is looming. Canada, quite frankly, will not meet that transition.

When the transition happens, at least 15% of the country will go black. People will start phoning the offices of members of Parliament saying that they cannot get their beloved Montreal Canadiens on Saturday night on television and they will want to know why. We will have to tell them that the government had years to prepare for the digital transition and did nothing. The Conservatives think this will magically be handled for them.

The other issue in terms of a broadband strategy and a digital strategy is the fact that as the analog signals are shut down for television and we move to digital, the analog spectrum, a very juicy chunk of cyber real estate, goes on the block to be sold. The analogue spectrum will be worth billions of dollars. Again, we would think a forward-looking government would consider this. It has a $56 billion in debt. It needs a national forward-looking plan not for next year or two years, but for the next 10 years. To finance that plan it could sell off the analogue spectrum, take those billions of dollars and commit them to a national broadband digital strategy. Then it could tell people that it was a forward-looking government.

We have not heard a peep from the current government about what it will do with the money. We have not heard how it will break up the analogue spectrum. Even the space between the various parts of the spectrum that used to be used for CTV, or CBC, or Canwest or the Quebec stations is valuable. We could put that to public use, for innovation, for new project ideas. We could reserve part of the analogue space that actually belongs to the people of Canada for innovation, for new ideas. There will be many new forms of communication that are on the verge of being discovered and having access to that spectrum band could put Canada in the lead, where we need to be. However, we are not seeing anything from the government on that.

We have to think about this. If the government had billions of dollars that should be spent to ensure Canada, rural Canada and northern Canada, could participate and compete against competitive countries that will go up to gigabyte-per-second download speeds, the analogue spectrum would be a great place to put that. However, what is the government going to do with that money? I have my own personal bets. I am not a gambling man and I am not offering to take anybody's money, but I think we would have to be quite the old backwoods route not to think what it is going to do with money. The government's forward-looking strategy could be to take the billions from the analogue spectrum and build prison cells.

The cost of building prisons under the government will be $270,000 per cell. The government does not even have people to put in them. It will just keep bringing up enough private members' bills to find new ways to arrest more Canadians to put them in prison.

We need a plan. Besides the government's ideological bizarre focus on blowing $10 billion on prisons at a time of the largest deficit in history, we have seen zero from the government in terms of a forward looking digital strategy.

I go back to the issue of spam. Spam should be a fairly straightforward issue to deal with. It is inconvenient. No one likes it except for the lobbyists who always talk to the government because hidden in spam is a lot of useless electronic sales ads that most of the Canadian public does not need. Nevertheless, even with the lobbyists, I am sure we could deal with the spam. The question is this. Where is the vision?

The government brought forward spam legislation. The House debated it. We went through the whole process and the government decided it was more convenient to take all that legislation, flush it down the political loo and suspend the democratic work of the House. It shut everything down and laid waste to its whole legislative agenda. It set the clock back to zero, which is not the first time it has done it. It is something that the government does on a regular basis. Whenever it seems to get bored with almost succeeding and actually getting something done, it seems to get restless.

The government cannot go forward, so it is stuck in the bills it has and it erases them all and it starts all over. We are now in October 2010 and we remain the only country without spam legislation.

I have been saying how the government does not like to move on anything unless it is part of its ideological agenda. It has no forward thinking vision in terms of copyright and balancing the needs in terms of an innovative agenda on issues like net neutrality, open source and open data, issues that could really excite the Canadian public to move forward.

In all fairness I have seen it move dramatically once or twice in terms of where its agenda is going usually in protecting the tar sands or protecting ideological hacks who are working and supporting the party.

At the Copenhagen conference back in December 2009, Canada was once again embarrassed on the international stage by our horrific standards on the environment. The government would say that it was a principled stand, just like I am sure Harold Ballard thought that the Leafs losing every year was a principled stand.

In the Copenhagen Conference there was a group called the “Yes Men”. The Yes Men are international political pranksters who set up a fake website. That fake website said that Canada would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 by 40% from 1990 levels and they would be down to 80% by the year 2050. Of course that was a total fraud. Canada was not going to do that. However, they were trying to make a political statement about the Conservative government's defence of the tar sands and how it embarrassed us politically.

The Canadian government moved against that website immediately. It went after the ISP in another jurisdiction and it ended up shutting down 4,500 websites because the government did not want to be challenged internationally on the tar sands. I think even red China would be awe struck by the willingness of the government to shut down democratic sites because it does not like what they have to say.

The government will do nothing about the fact that we have international fraudsters on the spam, but it will shut down democratic websites. The government has failed again and it will continue to fail on the international innovative agenda.

Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague spoke very well on this issue.

We have already filled up a significant amount of time in this Parliament dealing with this issue, and yet the government felt that this was such an unnecessary bill that it allowed it to be flushed along with all of last year's legislation. We are the only country in the G8 without anti-spam legislation.

The government continues to play out petty personal vendettas in the House of Commons. It has taken important legislation that we are seen on the international stage as having and that we need to have, and it flushes it down the political loo. Then we have to go through this whole process again.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why he thinks it is that in this House of Commons, thanks to the government, it takes up to two years to debate something as simple and straightforward as spam. We should have had this bill done long ago, but we had to be prorogued to allow the government to escape whatever political heat it was feeling at the time.

Petitions October 18th, 2010

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to bring forward a petition from people who are concerned about the misuse of digital rights management to digital locks on copyrighted material. Of specific concern is the move by the government to support the sacrosanct protection for digital locks that will override existing copyright rights that exist for Canadian citizens, educators, consumers, people who buy products and for people who use copyrighted works. They are not able to access them because the digital locks placed on top of them interfere with legal rights.

We know that many of the WIPO compliant countries have dealt with the issue of digital locks by ensuring that those that remain on products are not counterfeited or broken. However, in other WIPO compliant countries they have a balance so that citizens are still able to use and be educated with materials that they have a legal right to.

The Conservative government, of course, has it all wrong in terms of digital rights management.

The petitioners are calling upon Parliament to restore some sense of balance between the rights of creators and ensuring protection for copyrighted works, but also ensuring that we have a vibrant domain where people can actually access works within a digital realm.