Industry committee  I think we could attempt to do that.

Industry committee  Right. Why don't you guys answer this too? My own view is that we often try to get away from some of these definitional issues because early on we would have some of these discussions and spend half a day talking about what your definition is. It wasn't particularly productive

Industry committee  There is an exception in here as well for that sort of consumer-to-consumer personal correspondence. The issue is whether this now rises up to the level of clear commercial activity. I think there's some question as to whether or not it rises to that level. There is also, though,

Industry committee  I don't think there are many individuals who are going to look at that and think twice before they send out a message to their friend saying--

Industry committee  I'm going to repeat this. As long as you understand that there's a huge, massive exception, get consent. All of this is permitted as long as you obtain consent. We are now only in that basket where someone hasn't actually obtained the person's consent in the first place. They don

Industry committee  I admit that I think there's ample reason for some skepticism as to whether it will be enforced as effectively as it can be, at least on paper. I think that's one reason why a private right of action is a good thing, because it actually does allow the private sector to pick up th

Industry committee  There's the potential for that. The concern has actually been the opposite. My understanding is that there have been a number of instances in which there have been international investigations with a Canadian component, and there have been concerns as to whether or not Canadian a

Industry committee  I think there are still a lot of options in this regard. In fact, when I'm asked to make a connection with someone in this kind of context or other sorts of contexts, my approach, partly because I'm concerned about the privacy of the individual, is to send the person who's made t

Industry committee  Well, I actually think the legislation does deal with this in part, because there is, as I mentioned, the business-to-business exception. I'll tell you that when I launched my spam complaint, it also happened to be against a sports team. It was against the Ottawa Renegades, the o

Industry committee  No. There's been an ongoing issue in Canada as to whether or not e-mail addresses are themselves personally identifiable information. At a provincial level, there actually have been some attempts to exclude that, but federally, until we change the law, they are treated as persona

Industry committee  As I think we've mentioned, the experience elsewhere is that unless you have strong penalties, this doesn't work. I think there were even some quotes in the press from one Canadian-based spammer, who was laughing when told about the prospect of Canadian anti-spam legislation and

Industry committee  There are provisions that discuss that ability for information-sharing and coordination between agencies. Obviously the provisions themselves, in some instances, are targeted to a specific agent, one or the other, and one would hope that, properly resourced, there will be the abi

Industry committee  I think it's almost impossible to overstate the effect that this has on consumer confidence. I can recall, actually, that when we launched the spam task force, there was a press conference. I remember one of the reporters turned to the task force members and asked--I happened t

Industry committee  It's taken four years to get from the point of a unanimous task force report that included everybody across the spectrum to finally just getting legislation tabled, and there were a couple of false starts along the way. The notion that we're going to go back to zero I think would

Industry committee  I think the legislation already includes.... There is an enforcement arm. The goal of the task force, I assume, by virtue of this legislation, was to try to find a number of tools to go after this. Certainly there is within this legislation, as you know, a number of enforcement