Mr. Speaker, I too rise to join members in my caucus and all parties in the House to support the idea of Bill C-28. It is important to protect consumers and those who are affected by what is really more than just a nuisance, and that is spam.
I should also note that it is probably the first time the word “spam” has been debated so fervently and thoroughly. Most people would compare this to affordable food, but this is in fact a widespread nuisance, a deterrent to the free access of information. Some people use technology not only to create a nuisance, but also to scam people. It is not just about stopping spam; it is also about stopping scams.
We have had enough time with the new technology known as the Internet to understand that there needs to be a balance between access to information, that is, people being able to decide what they want to put online, and protecting people from being abused by the information on the Internet.
It has been mentioned by my colleague from Sudbury that this bill looks familiar. It was around before with one digit less than the one in front of us, Bill C-27, which was in the last Parliament before it prorogued. It is unfortunate that we had to wait so long to get this legislation going, because it is affecting many consumers right across the country. We must also look at how we are measured by our partners: we are the only G7 country without legislation on this matter. Clearly, the time for it is now, and we in the NDP welcome it.
I want to acknowledge my colleague from Windsor West. He has done a lot of work on consumer protection and anti-spam legislation, both on the legislation in front of us and on previous legislation. I want to acknowledge his work and thank him.
The technical term for spam does not roll off the tongue quite as readily as the abuse of electronic messaging systems. This includes most broadcast media, through which digital delivery systems are used to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of this is email spam, the term applies to other abuses like instant messaging. We have seen a lot of that lately by news groups that throw out spam.
Search engine spam is probably one of the most ubiquitous in that it is able to take the information from surfing the net, synthesize it, and throw the history of what one has been surfing back with advertisements and spam. There is software to block it, but that costs money. There is also spam in blogs and something called WikiSpam. There is spam for pretty much every aspect of our online culture these days.
We had this challenge before, and I see it from time to time with our faxes. There is a need to have proper regulation, not only to protect consumers but also to ensure that international scammers are curtailed and held to account. We must remember that this is not just a domestic problem.
Often these spam organizations and boiler rooms are looking for low-hanging fruit. They are looking for jurisdictions where there is not sufficient regulation. It goes without saying that Canada is wide open for this. It is analogous to how people use tax havens: we have not regulated enough to make sure our regulations are adequate for the 21st century.
It is a real problem and a costly one. The longer we have less spam regulation, the more it will cost businesses, individuals, and institutions to deal with it.
Spam results in large cost overheads for major corporations and small businesses. Consider the bandwidth problem and the net throttling that has gone on these last few years. There is less capacity for businesses, homes, and institutions to receive information, because of the spam being carried through the bandwidth. That means there are traffic jams on the Internet, because there is all this extra traffic in spam, which need not be there.
There is the cost of contacting each additional recipient. Once the spam has been constructed and multiplied, it proliferates. Trying to get to the source of it is a cost for people. Instead of chasing down who is spamming them, they could be doing something else.
Generally, there is also a social cost when we consider some of the spam that is put out. Some of it is offensive to families.
My colleague from Sudbury talked about having homes wired up with access to a computer. Some of the spam is offensive, either because of the nature of the spam, the pornographic content, or because certain messages convey values contrary to ours.
This is not just commercial. It is not just about selling us things we do not want. It is also about offensive material that costs us not just financially but socially as well.
