Industry committee  Do you mean in terms of limiting that transitional provision? Again, it's a provision for legitimate businesses that have an existing business relationship. It's really about the small and medium sized enterprises: the real estate agents, your insurance broker. It's to give them a little bit of time.

Industry committee  Basically the idea is that we put a box around referrals. We're allowing them, but we're saying they have to following the following rules. The following rules are these: for anybody to make a referral, they have to have that family or personal relationship with the person they're referring.

Industry committee  Not the way we've boxed the case. You have to have an existing and ongoing business relationship, so you have to be either my insurance agent or you have to have that expressly consented-to relationship for me to refer somebody to you.

Industry committee  Based on the way it's drafted, you don't, because it's just a discussion you had. You don't have a personal or family relationship or an existing business relationship. You don't really have a relationship of any kind, outside of the phone discussion you had with this person. The answer to a specific case like that is to just tell the brother to buy the season tickets.

Industry committee  To be honest, we wanted to make allowances for it but were afraid of putting this type of thing in the bill. On the idea behind the breadth and scope of it, you have to think of this as a balloon. If we keep poking holes in it, at some point it's going to explode. The whole idea behind the referral issue is to allow for legitimate contact, where there's an existing business relationship or family relationship, without allowing me to refer 250,000 of my friends.

Industry committee  The biggest difference between telemarketing and e-mailing is that there's a two-step process for telemarketing. If I'm on the phone with somebody and they tell me to never call again, I have to write down their name and input it into the computer. In 99 cases out of 100, if I send an e-mail to 100 of your friends and somebody asks to be taken off the list, it's a click of a button.

Industry committee  We did consider it, but before we put anything forward in the legislation we also considered the adverse. Let's say that instead of an 18-month existing business relationship, we set it at 36 months. Two years ago, I was a Bell customer. If we stretch this out too far, it's going to allow Bell to contact every customer who they pretty much know went to Rogers, because that's the main competition, and send out, under the existing business relationship, commercial electronic messages in an attempt to lure back their customers.

Industry committee  In that case, it is the consumer who is responsible for telling the company, for example, that he no longer wants to receive electronic business messages from it. If you have express consent, there are no limits. So if I give my real estate agent that consent and he contacts me for the first time six years later, that's quite legal, and that is fine.

Industry committee  That's correct.

Industry committee  No, nothing here prevents those companies from having a website.

Industry committee  That's it, spam. How do you make yourself known? What is the difference between a legitimate business and an individual who is trying to sell viagra? That's not a way to... Trying to contact everybody on the planet in one shot: ultimately, that's what spam is.

Industry committee  No. In our bill, there are penalties for those companies, even though they are American. As Philip said earlier, they could be liable to civil actions—in the private sense—because Quebec consumers would say they didn't expect to receive that. Decisions made by the civil courts in Canada can often be given effect in the United States.

Industry committee  That's not necessarily the case. I can create a website and enter into partnerships with other websites. I can also put advertising on other websites to refer people to my website, if there's no indication that should stop. Ultimately, the purpose of this bill is to promote that kind of activity.

Industry committee  As in any other act, there are jurisdictional problems. As described in the bill, the spam has to be sent to Canada.

Industry committee  That depends. If Romania has a similar act, the three agencies can coordinate an investigation with Romanian authorities.