We're still going to get spam

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Long-awaited legislation to help Canada fight the scourge of spam - junk e-mail - is one of 36 government bills that died on the order paper when the Harper Conservatives prorogued Parliament.

Bill C-27 has been more than five years in the making. In 2004, Ottawa launched an anti-spam task force that consulted widely before tabling a report in May of 2005 that called for legislation to combat spam.

The bill, first tabled in the House in April, would have banned unsolicited commercial e-mail and levied fines as high as $1-million for individuals who distributed spam. It had passed second reading in the Senate.

MPs and senators spent 28 hours and 19 minutes debating and deliberating over Bill C-27 before it was killed.

Michael Geist, an Internet law expert at the University of Ottawa, said that's only a fraction of the time that was devoted to the legislation, which would have made life difficult for those mass-marketing via e-mail.

"For every hour of House time or committee time you're talking about many, many more hours in preparation including briefings, research and corporate lobbying," he says.

"Here we had a bill that finally did make it through the process - it was a bit of a balancing act, and there were compromises - and now, you play politics and suddenly a bill that would have made a difference is back to scratch."

Not everyone is unhappy. Montreal Internet marketer Adam Guerbuez celebrated C-27's demise on his website, calling the prorogation a "glorious day where I, among many others in the industry, can yell out true victory on those who oppose our marketing methods and how we value the freedoms of being Canadian and operating on Canadian soil, where silly 'anti-spam,' or as we call it 'anti-marketing' laws, are non-existent and we all can operate fully within the laws of our great homeland, ensuring our freedom to mass market our products or services to the very responsive general public."

In 2008, a U.S. judge awarded Facebook damages totalling $873-million (U.S.) stemming from a lawsuit against Mr. Guerbuez. The social networking site had complained that Mr. Guerbuez and his company had bombarded its social-networking users with sexually explicit spam messages.

There is a chance of resurrecting all the legislation that died with prorogation. The Conservative government would have to introduce reinstatement motions in both the House and the Senate to restore the killed bills to the stage they were at when Parliament was prorogued. But this would require the unanimous consent of opposition parties which have so far been unwilling to play ball, with the NDP for instance saying it would only agree to this if the Tories come back Monday as originally scheduled before prorogation.

28 hours, 19 minutes : Time spent by MPs and senators debating and deliberating the bill in the House of Commons and the Senate.

44 : Numbers of witnesses who appeared before the House of Commons Industry Committee to speak on C-27.

64 : Number of amendments that MPs made to the bill to improve it.

33 : Number of written submissions made by interest groups and business organizations.

112 : Number of registrations by lobbyists who'd lined up to lobby on the legislation.

$240,000 : Cost of Industry Canada's Task Force on Spam, the recommendations from which formed the basis for the bill.

1 year : Amount of time the Task Force on Spam took to consult Canadians and draw up its report.

4th : Canada's rank among nations around the globe in terms of source countries for spam.