Your colleagues are picking on you, Mr. Speaker, but I will stick up for you and say that would be a fine shot, indeed, to send around the world.
Even in 2004 or 2005, we never thought we could take a picture and send it instantaneously. People can ask, “Where are you now”, and I can respond that I am in Newfoundland. They can ask me what it looks like and I can say, “It looks like this”, and send it. It is incredible.
However, that open opportunity for communications, which leads to an open opportunity for business for people seeking gainful employment, also opens us up to a realm of criminality. We can only assume that the criminal element out there is just as imaginative as the people who make a lot of money doing it the right way.
That brings me to Bill C-28. When it comes to prohibiting the sending of spam without the prior consent of recipients, that is the key. There is an element of consent with this and that way the element of criminality gets taken out of it because people will not be able to do it, but then we get into the issue of enforcement, which I will get to later.
Bill C-28 introduces legislation to enact all recommendations, and the recommendations prohibit the sending of spam without the prior consent of recipients, the use of false or misleading statements that disguise the origins or true intent of the email, which is very true as I mentioned earlier, and the installation of unauthorized programs, which I will talk about. That is the concept of spyware or malware that was talked about, these sorts of things. They are like little bugs that crawl through either the air or wire, gain access and do funny things to computers while people sleep or are doing something else.
The unauthorized collection of personal information or email addresses is the same type of principle. It infiltrates people's computers and all the material stored on hard drives or whatever devices they have to store memory. Not only can that information be taken but it can be manipulated and sent elsewhere and an all-out assault done on other computers around the world. It is quite fascinating how people have manipulated the system of instant communication over the past four or five years.
Bill C-28 introduces legislation to enact all the recommendations that I stated. Many flaws were exposed in the last bill and there was quite a bit of feedback from people who said that things needed to be fixed, some of it major and some minor, that sort of thing. A lot of it was minor. When prorogation happened, elements of what happened in the industry committee at that point, as well as sending the bill back to the House, because of course when prorogation happens, the bill dies and the bill is brought back to the House.... Some of the changes were incorporated into the bill at that time.
God forbid that I praise prorogation for the sake of making one bill better than the other or a new and improved bill. Nonetheless, there were a few changes made to it that have satisfied many people in this debate, which is a good thing.
The other point is that, as we monitor the legislation going through, we will realize then whether these changes were appropriate or not as we get to the regulations when, because of this legislation, it triggers Governor in Council or cabinet to make the regulations involved.
I mentioned earlier the 2004-2005 task force set up by the government of the day, which decided to have a good look at this particular situation. It hired 10 people involved in this and it received thousands and thousands of items of input from stakeholders around the world, not just in Canada. The recommendations came forward that involved themes of consent and involved themes of doing specific tasks in order to specifically go after people who were up to no good.
One of the issues we came in contact with in the four years since is that we have to realize that the technology has changed. Therefore the flexibility we need in this bill has been addressed to a certain degree, but I am sure the committee will have a closer look at that as well.
Just so that you know, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure you are aware of it, 60% to 80% of all email traffic around the world is spam. Of course, I am not talking about everyone's favourite lunch meat. I am talking about spam of a type that one does not want to get each and every day. They are selling everything. Some of the stuff I dare not repeat in the House, for fear of the wrath of you, Mr. Speaker, and others. But members can well imagine what I am talking about, soliciting money, soliciting a product that does not measure up, as it were.
The sheer volume of messages poses a challenge not just to the individual owner of a particular computer or a bank of computers, for that matter, but to Internet service providers or ISPs, as we like to call them, legitimate businesses that conduct their activities over the Internet and email and, most importantly, consumers.
Let me just stay with that first point, businesses. There are so many businesses now that rely upon the Internet and the two-way communication between some consumer and themselves that the presence of all this spam material basically erodes the revenue stream for them, and that is a huge issue. If we do not address that, then many small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs, will suffer and continue to suffer.
I personally know some businesses that are spending thousands of dollars each month for software to get rid of the spam. These are people who cannot afford this cost but most of their business models, vis-à-vis direct marketing, go through the Internet because we have become global in scale.
Look at the tourism ads from Newfoundland and Labrador, where I come from. We get an incredible amount of response from across this country about those new ads that we see about Newfoundland and Labrador, but for a lot of these smaller businesses some of it is spam and some of it is legitimate.
As the House knows, I come from an area that relies a lot on the seal harvest every year. Many tourism operators get a lot of junk mail, spam, things to take them down, from animal rights groups not just in North America but around the world. They are using these techniques to go after these small businesses.
This is the type of activity we are into where we need to cut down on this. If it is a legitimate form of protest, such an email from one individual to a business saying that he or she does not like a product or that he or she does not like the way the business thinks about a certain issue and therefore will not frequent the business, I understand. However, people use these methods,which are put out by spam in certain cases, and they try to block their own computer data banks. We are talking about a small or medium-sized enterprise.
One can well imagine that these protest groups with larger amounts of money can actually gum up the system, as it were, very easily. Hopefully, some of this legislation will cut down on that. At least I feel it will.
Spam is also a large component of computer viruses. The seal harvest issue is a good example because there were a couple of examples of that happening. One of the ways of doing this is by using phishing programs, not “fishing” as in f-i-s-h-i-n-g, but p-h-i-s-h-i-n-g, which is designed for identity theft.
Identity theft is a huge issue with underworld crime. One of the ways identity theft occurs is through the use of spyware, for example, which can grab information from our computer and, from our computer, it goes out to other computers and gets that same sort of information and racks up our credit cards or whatever they may be. Therein lies a situation that we need to deal with on a global scale.
That brings me to one of my final points, which is the international scope of this.
Even though we are here debating, we vote to send this to a committee, I assume it comes back with some minor changes and it becomes law rather quickly. Once that is done, it is incumbent upon us, not just members of the cabinet and not just the Prime Minister but all of us as parliamentarians, to engage in all international fora that are out there, whether it be through the European Union, the Council of Europe, or through Southeast Asia. We need to engage all mechanisms, including the United Nations, because it will take a massive global effort to cut down on the amount of junk mail spam and the illegal activity associated with it.
By doing that, it will be an incredible step forward. If we are the final G8 nation to sign up for this, then the G8 should be the leading role for the rest of the nations, whether it is Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and all the other nations where the proliferation of electronic media is so great. Again, that is what was not covered in 2004 and 2005. Who thought of facebook back then? Not very many people. However, now we have facebook, which is an incredible communicator for photos, family issues and a big one for business as well. It is a huge issue.
When it comes to enforcement, this is only a small part of this battle. The enforcement of these laws, followed by the regulations, will take a concerted effort, not just by the CRTC, which is handling this primarily, and not just the Competition Bureau, but other aspects of society, including all law officers, that this is a serious issue because we need to elevate the awareness of it. What people are doing through things such as spam is so illegal that a lot of people look at these things and do not pay much attention to them. However, some of them are very dangerous to us, to our finances and to small business owners. The enforcement part of this bill, Bill C-28, will take a massive effort.
