Jim Maloway

[Pensions, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Chair, I have certainly enjoyed the member's speeches over the last couple of years.

When it comes to the issue of pensions, doubling the CPP from $908 a month to $1,800 a month phased in over 35 years is the solution almost everybody I talk to agrees with. I cannot find anybody who agrees that a supplementary voluntary pension plan is the way to go. The Liberal Party should recognize that. The idea has been out there for six months. It is not getting traction anywhere. There is no real support for it. It is time to give it up, get on board with the majority and support the idea of increasing the CPP.

Even the government, after all of the hearings that it had, has agreed that increasing the CPP is the way to go.

We should all be working together here. Voluntary plans do not really work. Only people who have money who are thinking in terms of retirement will invest in these plans. Other people will simply spend the money on other things. At the end of the day, we would have a very uneven system. We would have people who are very poor who do not have pension plans and other people who have extra resources who have decent plans. That is not a very good way to plan retirement in this country.

The errors and mistakes that we have in the system right now, it is the Liberal governments in the past that have set up all the pension schemes we have right now. And here--

[Pensions, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Chair, our pension critic, the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, is fond of saying that we ensure our cars, so why can we not ensure our pension funds.

Actually, it is not as complicated as it sounds. In 1987, after two or three property and casuality insurance bankruptcies, the provinces across the country got together with the industry and set up a compensation fund. Right after that, the life insurance companies did the same thing. We have travel acts in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, where if we do not get the trip we paid for, if the agency goes bankrupt, we are compensated. Canada has all sorts of examples of how we should be doing this.

We can insure our trips and we insure our cars and our houses. Why in the world can we not insure our pension plans?

I would like to ask the member. I am sure he agrees with the idea. Why is the government dragging its feet on this issue?

[Pensions, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Chair, I think if we asked Canadians whether they would support the NDP approach, possibly supported by the government, to double the CPP, to take their CPP payments from $908 a month to $1,800 a month, phased in over 35 years, with a 2.5% increase on behalf of the employee and a 2.5% premium on behalf of the employer to pay for it, guaranteed, I think they would take that option over this Liberal approach .

The Liberal approach is a supplementary voluntary pension, which I believe has been around now for about six months and going nowhere. I do not think anybody is taking the idea seriously out there. How they expect a voluntary pension to provide equity over the long term is beyond me.

In making the plan voluntary, it tends to be the people with money, richer people, who can afford to get into it and benefit. The poorest people do not actually take advantage of it. So whatever program we have has to be a compulsory program.

I would like to know when the Liberal Party is going to see the light, get on board with the majority, and move together to improve the pension system in this country for the long-term benefit of the residents of Canada.

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, according to Cisco Systems, there were some 200 billion spam messages a day as of 2008 and 9 billion spam messages a day from Canada, which surprised me. This was before we had the explosion in smartphones.

Until recently, there was not a problem with spam on regular cellphones. However, as the smartphones proliferate and become more powerful, there will be an explosion in spam, unlike we have seen up until now. This is just the beginning and this legislation is coming probably later than it should.

Does the member have any further comments to add or other points to make?

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to delve into the do not call list issue with the member.

The member will recall that when the government introduced the do not call list legislation, it was very popular with the public initially. The public phoned in by the thousands to get on the do not call list. We found out later on that the people who phoned in to get on the do not call list were actually getting more calls after they were put on the list. That did not work out very well.

What we have with this legislation is that the do not call list legislation will eventually be eliminated and will be covered, I assume, by this legislation over time.

Once again, it takes us back to how the government rolled out the do not call list legislation in the first place. The fact is that small businesses across the country were very confused. There was debate within all these little offices about who one could contact and who one could not. Previously, real estate agents were able to contact people with whom they had been doing business with previously and then the rules were changing on them. There was a lot of confusion under the do not call list legislation and I think there will be now on this legislation. I would like to ask the member to comment on that.

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I did appreciate the member's comments. I think he added a little more clarity to the issue than he did previously. I am reasonably happy with his explanation of how things would work.

The reality, though, is that the question was how this bill would have dealt with the issue of the Facebook case. The basis for adjudication under this bill is going to follow the route of the CRTC, going to the parties that are causing trouble and trying to deal with them and get an undertaking from them to cease and desist from what they are doing.

I agree that is the way we should proceed. As much as possible, we should get voluntary compliance before we go any further.

The second option is looking at the fines. The fines are $1 million for individuals and $10 million for organizations. There are a number of different options they could use to decide how much to fine them. If there a situation like Frank magazine, which used to incorporate each issue and say up front that it was going to publish whatever defamatory remark about people it wanted, then people could sue it, but each issue was incorporated. That is tantamount to this guy declaring bankruptcy. So that clearly did not work.

This bill does not offer any criminal options. There are no criminal offences under this bill. My suggestion is that, potentially, there may be instances, hopefully very few of them, where we may have to look at that option. That is why I asked why we were not hearing many government speakers on this whole issue, as to what happened in the other G7 countries that have had this legislation much longer.

Surely the government could have learned from the experience of the other countries. It could have tailored the legislation to take into account any deficiencies that these other countries found.

I also liked the member's idea about sharing information. This particular bill does allow for that, but he is talking about treaties, I believe, that would be signed individually, similar to the 90 double-taxation agreements we have with countries around the world.

By the way, the members should know that in the case of Panama, with which we are working on a free trade deal, Canada does not have a double-taxation agreement with Panama and yet France does. In six months, from February until now, France managed to get an agreement just by putting on pressure. However, that is a different issue and a different bill.

I would like to ask the member if he would give his comments about how he feels the government rollout of this bill should proceed, because I do see a potential for confusion with small business.

Could the member comment on this?

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his clarification on that point.

Another concern we had was about the roll out of the legislation. The member knows that after having passed legislation and gone through all the processes of committee and testimony and so on, there would still be thousands of little businesses all over Canada that would not be aware that we passed the legislation. That can be upsetting to some of them as they try to adjust to the new rules.

Some of the new rules under the bill involve how they interact with their customer base. When the do not call list came out, businesses were concerned they would not be able to contact their existing customers to sell them a different type of product or service. It provided a lot of acrimony in some workplaces.

The issue I have is we cannot question government members because there are not any. Therefore, we are not sure what its roll out will be or what form it will take. Is there going to be advertising? Are businesses going to be mailed letters? Is there going to be a CD package sent out to businesses or business organization to consult with small business as to how they are supposed to implement the requirements of the act, as opposed to doing it piecemeal?

I have really no confidence that the government has the ability to roll out anything in any type of efficient manner.

I think we would want to ask these questions now before we start getting calls in our constituency offices from small businesses across the country, wondering what in the world the government has done. The fact is the intention of the bill is excellent. It is something we support. It is something that should have been brought forward long ago

I want to get some clarification from the member about these various points.

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, one of the issues we wanted to try to resolve today was in the case of the Facebook suit. In that case, the judgment was against the individual. We wanted to think in terms of that in the context of the bill. Had the bill been in force at that time, would the penalties under the act have had any application to that gentleman?

We know, for example, that the authorities will be proceeding by undertaking as much as possible. The CRTC will try to get the perpetrators to stop doing what they are doing. That probably would not have worked with this gentleman.

The second option is to look at fines of $1 million or $10 million in the case of companies. Clearly this gentleman declared bankruptcy and moved on. Therefore, that would not have worked.

The question is whether any sort of a criminal offence would have helped stop this person. Violations under C-28 are not criminal offences.

The debate today has been about whether this bill would have proper application to the Facebook case. Perhaps we will have to revisit the bill in two or three years and take another look at it. If more Facebook-like cases evolve and the bill does not apply, then we will have to haul it back and look at making tougher sanctions available to people who do what the Facebook operator did.

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I think we all agree that most of the actions against perpetrators would be dealt with through undertakings and agreements to cease and desist, and we would not even get to the basis of fines.

The fact of the matter is, though, that the roll-out of the bill is something that concerns me, the effects on small business and its customers. There are going to be road bumps that we have to deal with on that issue.

I just want to ask the member whether he thinks the government is prepared for a proper roll-out of this bill so that we do not create confusion in the public over what the provisions are.

[Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, November 23rd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the authorities intend to deal with violators as much as possible by way of undertakings, to have people voluntarily quit doing what they are doing. That may solve a lot of the problems but then our backup is the fines. I say the fines are high enough at $1 million and $10 million.

The question comes down to the fact that violations are not criminal offences. We can talk all we want about vicarious liability of directors and officers of corporations, but in the recent Facebook case, the spammer was ordered to pay $1 billion, but the gentleman simply laughed at the system and declared bankruptcy. So, what good is a fine of $1 million? What good is it for the authorities to go after the guy and ask him for an undertaking to cease and desist and stop what he is doing? If that does not work and fines do not work, what is going to work? This is a well-known case that got national coverage in the last few weeks.

The bill would do absolutely nothing to deal with this issue. If we already have an example before the bill is even passed, then how many more of these little guys are going to do what that gentleman succeeded in doing?