Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair and honourable members, we appreciate your invitation and are very pleased to be here today on behalf of the privacy and access law section, immigration law section, and commodity tax, customs, and trade sections of the Canadian Bar Association, as well as the Canadian

Industry committee  Could I address that, because I talked about the distinction between “unsolicited” and “unwanted”. There are going to be instances, at least in my own experience—and yours may differ substantially—where I'm not going to seek something out, but information about it would be welco

Industry committee  Yes. If I could just add to that, I think the door is already open, because you could have a categorical outline of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages unless you have the explicit consent of the supposed recipient. The door has opened by opening up this existing business rela

Industry committee  Thank you very much. I'm not sure that we have such a radically different philosophy or approach to it. I think there is a concern that if you're going to sanction administrative monetary penalities, civil damages, and things like that, you go after the appropriate targets. Ther

Industry committee  The CBA didn't explicitly address this in our brief, so this will be more of a personal opinion. It would make sense that it would take place as rapidly as reasonably possible in the circumstances, to a maximum of whatever would be reasonable, be it 10 days or 31 days. The onus

Industry committee  What it does is impose a compliance cost, in the same way as dealing with spam imposes a cost of having to deal with that spam. I'm not sure where exactly the balance lies between those two aspects. Certainly it will make people think--hopefully it will make people think twice-

Industry committee  Obviously we didn't do a full economic analysis of what the full impact of the legislation would be, but I'm not sure--

Industry committee  At the time of our review, we didn't do a finely tuned comparison of the different legislative regimes in different jurisdictions, so I wouldn't be able to answer that question in sufficient detail.

Industry committee  Fundamentally, the challenge we're dealing with is that we have a piece of legislation that starts with a very broad prohibition and then has exceptions. Those exceptions are really quite firm, although they do have the possibility of being altered significantly in regulation. T

Industry committee  Thank you very much. As a preface to all of our comments, we'd like to emphasize for the benefit of the committee that we agree wholeheartedly with the intent of the legislation. I think there's general consensus that spam wastes time, energy, and significant resources, is a sou

Information & Ethics committee  My apologies, but I'm going to have to depart in order to catch a flight.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't have first-hand experience with it.

Information & Ethics committee  Perhaps I might touch on both your points. On the first one, I'm not sure we would actually see a dramatic increase in the number of access to information requests, if it's expanded.

Information & Ethics committee  It would be interesting to find out statistics on that. To base it in my own practice--that would be for institutions, public bodies that are subject to access to information provincial equivalents--the number that have come from outside Canada, or even from outside the province

Information & Ethics committee  Oh, the issues with respect to cost. I think they're very difficult to try to pin down exactly. And one should not actually be in a position to ask people why they're asking for that information and how they intend to use it, because if there's one cost for an individual and one