One Canadian's junk e-mail is another's bread and butter.
Concerned about the fallout for their marketing plans, Canadian businesses are imploring Ottawa to put loopholes in tough anti-spam legislation that is wending its way through the House of Commons.
Defenders of the bill, however, warn the exceptions sought would gut the law's efforts to beat back the scourge of junk e-mail, which now accounts for 90 per cent of all electronic mail messages.
The Harper government is proposing to ban unsolicited commercial e-mail.
The legislation, which would levy fines as high as $1-million for individuals, already contains exceptions, of course, and businesses are seeking to broaden these legal margins of manoeuvre.
As it stands, Bill C-27 would allow companies to send marketing e-mails to Canadians who've recently had business dealings with them, or those who've given express consent to receive such mailings. But groups from insurers to bankers to financial advisers say this is not enough.
They say the spam ban would prevent them from using the Internet to attract new clients because it would stop the first e-mail to obtain initial consent. They want an exemption allowing them to broach this topic electronically, in particular with “referrals” – those identified by existing clients as friends or relatives seeking their services.
“Letters are fine, the telephone is fine, but e-mail is more and more the way to go,” Paul Vaillancourt, a financial adviser, told the Commons Industry committee recently.
He predicted C-27 as written would set back by decades the process of recruiting clients.
“We'll have to resort to strategies from a generation or two ago. In other words, I think there'll be a resurgence in Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, and social networking groups that rely on face-to-face meetings and rubber chicken dinners, as opposed to meeting online, which is how a lot of people work these days.”
Some retailers are asking for far more leeway on the length of time they'd be allowed to e-mail customers after selling something to them. Ottawa is proposing in Bill C-27 that past customers be deemed to have given “implied consent” to receiving e-mail from the vendor for 18 months after the transaction. But Amazon.com, the online retailer, wants this extended to between five and seven years. “Joan Thomas just won the most recent Amazon.ca first novel award for her book Reading by Lightning ,” Paul Misener, Amazon's vice-president of global public policy told MPs at a recent Industry committee meeting.
“Shouldn't consumers who bought this book be notified of her next [one], even if it takes her many years to write?”
University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, an expert in Internet and e-commerce law, warns that exemptions would water down the bill, creating loopholes that can be exploited. He said that's how Canada's do-not-call telephone registry was ruined. “We've seen this movie before.”
Tory MPs say they don't want firms using a first-contact loophole to send out millions of e-mails seeking consent to continue e-mailing Canadians, saying that itself would be spam. Businesses however say mailings would be targeted and small in number.
But Professor Geist said Canadians should expect to have control over their electronic communication rather than be confronted with e-mails soliciting business – as those recommending changes propose. “They want to flip it from opt-in to opt-out,” he said.
Conservative MP Mike Wallace, a member of the Commons Industry committee, said he favours “being very tough” in the initial anti-spam law and then reviewing it three years out. “When you start adding a whole bunch of exceptions, the bill loses its value.”
