Industry committee  Assuming you're not with me on moving from opt-in to opt-out—I suspect that ship has sailed—what I'd suggest is this. Number one, find a better way of carving out those one-off emails that are written by a real person. Monsieur Le Roux was right that there are often exemption

Industry committee  Correct.

Industry committee  I don't mean the automated ones that Monsieur Le Roux was talking about but real one-off emails. The second one is to clean up the definitions. There is a lot of discussion around subsection 6(6) of the law. Here's the problem. You have a definition of a commercial electronic mes

Industry committee  The third one.... Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Industry committee  I don't have anywhere near the detailed data that Mr. Le Roux has, but I can offer a couple of examples. I had a client—I obviously can't name them—who wanted to dig into issues around text messaging. I can't remember what the bill was, but if memory serves, it was several thous

Industry committee  I'm not. That's not the kind of evidence I would be tracking. It's not really what I do. What I can say is this. As a consumer, I get many things that I don't want. I get a lot of flyers in the mail and I don't want them, except that sometimes there's one I do want, and I don't

Industry committee  Don't worry.

Industry committee  No, it hasn't, sir. The private right of action was due to come into force this summer. It's been delayed, I believe, pending your review.

Industry committee  I did speak with some class action lawyers to ask them if they were chomping at the bit, and the answer wasn't the scare stories that some have told. I should fairly point out that the answer was was, “Well, we'll wait and see how it goes.”

Industry committee  I'm thinking on the fly here. First of all, changing the central mechanism would mean they would not need to get consent to send an electronic message. Now, that doesn't mean they could just go and blast away. There's still PIPEDA to consider. There's still the issue of how they

Industry committee  First of all, in terms of helping the consumer, CASL certainly does help consumers in ways, and I wouldn't want you to think that I'm saying it doesn't. The—

Industry committee  I may have overstepped. The point is that the central thrust of it, the opt-in requirement, I see as bad. However, having strong unsubscribe mechanisms—and they're there in CASL—makes a lot of sense. Any reasonable anti-spam law is going to have those, so I wouldn't want you to t

Industry committee  Sure. The fellow who founded that contacted me some time ago, or I contacted him, and he put me on his list of advisers. That's more or less the extent of my involvement with them. I've spoken with them but I'm appearing here to give you my own opinion. I'm not doing so on their

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm a lawyer. I practise a mix of competition law and commercial litigation. I'd like to think that it's my competition law experience that is going to drive a lot of what I'm going to tell you today. I'm going to divide my comments on CASL into three cate