Charlie Angus

[Toronto Port Authority, November 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the Toronto Port Authority is a swamp of sleaze and corruption.

We are now learning that the board was rewriting minutes of their meetings while rubber-stamping dodgy receipts.

What a perfect training ground for our own ethically challenged Minister of Natural Resources. She used the crown agency to troll for political donations. She covered up expenses while dining out like aristocracy on the taxpayers' dime.

The Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities could have cleaned house but instead he played along.

Will the government finally rein in these rogue ministers?

[Fairness for the Self-Employed Act, November 5th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, there are over 2.6 million self-employed in Canada. Of them, 21,000 are members of ACTRA. These are the people who work in television, film, in the arts. ACTRA has been pushing for years to extend benefits to the self-employed and to ensure that there is parental leave for workers in the film industry.

Steve Waddell, who is very active in ACTRA, said that this issue is one of basic fairness. I was speaking with Ferne Downey who said, “Our union has been fighting for years to get governments to recognize self-employed workers deserve these rights”. She said, “We are urging all parties to support the extension of benefits to the self-employed and for parental leave”.

In light of the hard work of what ACTRA does for the cultural sector of this country, will the Bloc work with the NDP, because we have supported these motions for some time, to ensure that our arts sector workers are given the parental benefits that they deserve?

[Business of Supply, November 4th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I have been speaking with families on the James Bay coast whose loved ones are living in unheated tents, thanks to the fact that the government has abandoned basic infrastructure needs and left them abandoned in a sewage crisis.

What we are seeing with H1N1 is not a surprise. This was seen coming for some time. The World Health Organization was focused on this. In our first nations communities we are seeing the return of tuberculosis on northern reserves. Our young people are dying at young ages from all kinds of ailments, from contamination and from a lack of medical services. They were the most vulnerable.

The government saw what happened this spring with H1N1 hitting the reserves in northern Manitoba. It knew what was coming and yet in our communities there is fear because they feel that once again they have been abandoned. They are the most susceptible to H1N1, because we have 15 and 20 people living in two bedroom homes.

Does the hon. member see this as part of a larger pattern of abandonment of isolated first nations communities by the government?

[Business of Supply, November 4th, 2009]

Mr. Speakers, we really must ensure that we are talking about this and not trying to turn it into a witch hunt. We all have to take our role very seriously in terms of H1N1.

However, my concern is that we have seen this coming for some time. We knew what we were going to be seeing. Yet, in my region in northern Ontario, where there are shortages, there is real fear in isolated communities on the James Bay coast such as Kashechewan and Attawapiskat. They saw what happened last spring.

Last spring in northern Manitoba was a test run for what was going to happen to first nations communities across this country. Our communities have shut down. They have shut down the schools and airports. They do not want anyone even coming into the community because they are afraid of what they are facing. Yet, a government that should have had a plan to deal with the isolated communities seems not to have been there at a time when it made the promise.

We saw this. We knew what was going to happen. Why does the hon. member think that it is happening before us in the isolated communities in northern Canada right now?

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, when the government brought in the do not call registry, individuals signed up so they would not be called. Then we found out that international scammers simply walked away with that list because internationally the registry is not respected. All the people, who put their numbers on the list so they would not be called, found themselves victimized by fraud artists and scammers.

There is talk about taking the existing registry and rolling it into Bill C-27. That is possible and I am open to the suggestion. However, my concern is this. Given the fact that the government showed absolutely no teeth in dealing with all of the scam artists in the Cayman Islands, and wherever else, who obtained the list of our citizens, how are we going to ensure that we are protected from international scammers who have no interest in what we proclaim in the House of Commons?

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, we have moved this legislation along to the point where it should be ready to be made law. However, then we look at the do not call registry which was made law.

I am sure most members of the House have received phone calls. I receive calls at home all the time telling me my credit card information is incorrect and I have to press 1 immediately to correct credit card information. I am getting those calls at home. I was not getting them before the do not call registry was established.

It seems to me that we can say whatever we want in the House about spammers. We can talk until we are blue in the face and yet the fraud and misrepresentation continues, and the lack of political will to get serious about this remains in place.

I would ask my hon. colleague, does he think, besides reviewing the bill and its effectiveness, we need to show our other competitive countries in the G8, which are actually serious on these things? We preach the gospel of change, but it seems that once something is implemented, the government goes back to being an agnostic on actually dealing with it.

In light of the failure of the do not call registry, would my hon. colleague like to perhaps guess where this is going to go?

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's speech.

The issue that we are trying to deal with here, on all sides I would hope, is the need to ensure that innovation continues to happen, that we believe that the Internet is going to be more and more of a vehicle for not just economic innovation but for social, cultural and political discourse. Therefore, there has to be the issue of confidence.

When people go on the Internet and they respond to people they might not know, they have to have a fundamental sense of confidence that they can make those connections. Without those links that are being made from person to person, from business to business, major problems will occur in terms of impeding productivity and also undermining the fundamental revolutionary power of what is before us.

The issue of spam is not simply an issue of an irritant. It is not simply that it bothers us because we have to delete from our inbox everyday hundreds of useless irritating emails. The deeper issue is the underlying issue of spam that leads to fraud. There is such an interconnection between the misuse of Internet communication and international fraud rings. We see that Canada was alone in the G7 in terms of having any kind of plan for dealing with spam up until now and we are also one of the worst spam bases in the G7 and, in fact, the world.

Could my hon. colleague speak to the connection between fraud and spam, and the need to have an international standard because a spam artist knows no domestic boundary or border?

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, Clay Shirky has just written a book entitled Here Comes Everybody and what he says in it is that we are on the verge of an absolute transformation in industrial design in terms of economic ordering.

Clay says that when new technology comes in is not when the revolution happens. The revolution happens when the technology becomes boring and every day. When everybody is posting pictures of their babies online and emailing back and forth is when the real, new transformative powers begin to happen.

What Clay talks about is cognitive surplus. For example, if most of us go online and basically treat it like TV, there is no difference. However, if 5% of us are on maybe a genealogical site putting information online or doing something like Flickr where there are millions and millions of photos being built up, there is power in so many people putting just 1% or 2% of their time into building something bigger, like Wikipedia, which has enormous transformative power.

If we look at the success of Wikipedia, Clay is positing that this is the beginning of this sort of wiki building of all kinds of people coming together. That is the new model for design innovation. That is where we are going to begin to see the whole transformation of the industrial complex.

Whereas before, it was hierarchical, top down; now, there is going to be a whole movement. However, in order to make that happen, there has to be confidence and people have to know that as they are sharing information, they are not being ripped off, that they are not going to be getting hit with tons of emails and subjected to fraud. There has to be a sense that they can go online to transform and build new economies, new ideas, and new systems of working together. There has to be confidence and one way to get that confidence is to get the scammers, the spammers and the fraudsters off the Internet.

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's example is very pertinent because it actually speaks to another level.

I spoke of Facebook and young people getting scammed. The banking information tends to affect older people because they are very concerned about their bank credit. They receive an email, and I have received a similar email which looks just like it comes from my bank, and the email says it needs my banking information because there has been a fraud committed. That is how it happens. A person believes they have had a relationship with their bank, but if they look at those emails closely, they will suddenly realize there is something not quite correct. The hon. member raises an excellent point.

Within the confines of the bill, it will be able to go after the scammers who are sending these kinds of messages out. It will allow for people to sue, which is an important provision. The bigger issue, though, goes back to the issue we face with Facebook. We really need a larger information campaign about the rights of the digital citizen and what people need to do to protect themselves. It is not about locking the Internet down. That will not happen. It is about giving people a level of assurance, whether they are senior citizens who are getting on the Internet for the first time or whether they are young people or whether they are people like us who press, press, press, click, click, click all day long. We never know when we will make that mistake.

We do need to have this discussion. It is not a partisan discussion. This is a discussion we need to have as a Canadian legislature in terms of looking at some of the problems out there that are not being addressed. Education will be one of the key ones in stopping these kinds of scams.

[Electronic Commerce Protection Act, November 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the issue is of how phishing is used to send out a simple email. Someone responds and then basically they have got that person. They have information. They can use that information against that person. That is a huge concern.

I would like to put it in a broader context. Where it is being used now in a very dangerous way is on Facebook. The Privacy Commissioner has certainly come out, as a result of the excellent work of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, and raised the issue of privacy concerns on Facebook.

Every one of us is on Facebook, I am sure. Our kids are on Facebook. They do not see that posting their names, their cellphone numbers, all kinds of personal information about themselves, can hurt them down the road, because there are scammers out there. What is our solution? Is our solution as legislators to say, “Bad, bad, bad. We have to shut this down”, or is it to say that, no, we need to have the laws in place to protect people and to go after the people who misuse it.

Second, I think it is as important, not within the confines of the bill and it would not fit within the bill but I think it is something we need to look at, is the need to educate young people. Until people have been scammed, they will never get scammed so they do not have to worry about it. But as I said earlier, I used the example of a young student who received a scam yesterday and it had three pertinent pieces about her and her personal identity that she figured it had to be someone she knew.

All we have to do is go on Facebook. I could tell a people what high school they went to. I could tell them who their first girlfriend was. I could tell them their date of birth and their star sign. If I am looking to scam a person, going on Facebook is the first place I would go. It is the ultimate phishing expedition and people will see some long-term implications from that kind of free flow of personal, private information that people think is protected because it has just been seen by their friends, but third party applications are using it, and all kinds of corporate entities are getting in and getting access to this information.