Canada To Get Anti-Spam Law

Emulating American legislators is something that those who we vote for to represent us in Ottawa have sadly spent too much time doing, best recent example was the DMCA clone that was almost pushed on Canadians which was killed by the call of federal election last fall. Introduced this past Friday Canada's elected parliamentarians introduced a bill that would essentially become the Canadian version of the CAN-SPAM law that has been in effect in the United States for the past several years.

Passing an law designed to make spam stop won't do that, however in order to prevent Canada from becoming a haven for spammers, government had to do something. This may be a good first step but it cannot be the only step. Government needs to revise and enforce existing laws that spammers often break because the products they sell don't perform as advertised. Canada's information technology industry and Internet service providers also have opportunities and responsibilities to provide spam filtering technology. Canada's banks who issue credit cards required to pay for products and services advertised through spam e-mail can simply choose not to process payments to those who advertise through spam e-mail. They could choose to do it but they will probably will have to be legislated to do it.