International Trade committee  I'm glad you liked the five I started with. I think those are the kinds of issues, given that we are actively renegotiating NAFTA and negotiating TPP 11, that are very much current. Taking the perspective that e-commerce is somehow a threat and that those jobs can leave isn't t

International Trade committee  I'll start by noting that there's no single solution, and you're right to highlight it as an issue. I mentioned in my opening remarks the importance of trust, and I highlighted that in the context of the anti-spam legislation. It is worth emphasizing that the anti-spam legislat

International Trade committee  There's a reason that I started the five recommendations with access, because I really do think it is the foundational issue that you have to address. You are right to note that there is not a quality of access today, and access even where it is available in many places remains e

International Trade committee  I think Canadian privacy law largely meets global standards, although we've started to see the European Union in particular, through something known as the GDPR, elevate those standards. I think we're going to rapidly face some challenges if the EU starts digging into whether or

International Trade committee  Mr. Simons has obviously made a strong case for why he thinks there's a problem. I'll say a couple of things. First off, I think there is an inevitability to sales taxes in the online environment, so with regard to this debate over Netflix sales tax, the notion that somehow ther

International Trade committee  I think we've done a good job domestically, generally speaking, in establishing e-commerce-related rules. We have fairly high standards when it comes to privacy. We have consumer protection rules that could still be improved, but we do fairly well. We have the anti-spam law that

International Trade committee  Thanks very much. Good afternoon. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. As always, I appear today in a personal capacity representing only my own views. While there are m

Industry committee  No. The evidence we received was that it wasn't about who was doing the enforcing. It was about the penalties. It was clear if you took a look at some of the weak laws, say, in the United States, just like the CAN-SPAM act, fundamentally if you were a spamming organization, you j

Industry committee  I'm going to pick up on that with one other point, and that's to say that we pay not just for that but also in terms of the spam we receive. I would disagree with respect to Mr. Messer's point that somehow it's the telecom providers or the ISPs that bear the cost. No. We bear the

Industry committee  I agree with Mr. Kardash on this. There are three agencies. I don't have any sense that the particular agencies themselves represent the problem at this point in time. Again hearkening back to when we were working on the report, we met with authorities from the United States an

Industry committee  I think we need to understand that the existence of the private right of action under the law is not an accident. We looked at other jurisdictions which had it, and then spoke to organizations that had used it and found it was effective. In the United States, where you see some

Industry committee  I want to pick up on that notion that back in 2004 we couldn't or wouldn't have predicted necessarily the rise of social media and some of these other technologies. I think that's true. In fact, the committee recognized that there was a rapid pace of change taking place. Ironical

Industry committee  I agree with that. I agree with the premise of the question, and I think it's a question best posed to the enforcement agencies as to why they haven't targeted those—

Industry committee  My comment is twofold. One, I think the CRTC has failed to target, as I think you rightly point out, the remaining large spamming organizations. From my perspective, it's inexplicable, given that we know where they are. It was amazing when the law was being crafted and we had at

Industry committee  I'm happy to tell you that as a task force we met with law enforcement regularly. It was a real challenge at the time in regard to convincing them that some of these issues rose to the level of deserving some of their attention and the use of their scarce resources. Years later,