Spam Legislation in Canada: Federalism, Freedom of Expression and the Regulation of the Internet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Email has emerged as a highly popular means of communication in Canada and around the world, allowing individuals and businesses to transmit information to recipients anywhere and at very little expense. However, the inexpensive and ubiquitous nature of email is being exploited by spammers, who seek to profit from mass mailings of incredible volumes of unsolicited emails. Once merely an annoyance, the problem of spamming has grown into a substantial commercial and social concern. Many countries have enacted legislation directed specifically at the issue of spamming, although Canada has only recently begun to seriously consider this option in detail. This paper begins by reviewing the rise and nature of spam along with its associated costs and problems. It then reviews various options others have considered to control spam. It is expected that Canada would consider these options as it enters its own dialogue in deciding whether to enact spam-specific legislation. The prospect of future Canadian spam legislation raises two important constitutional considerations: (1) which level of Canadian government (federal or provincial/territorial) is legislatively competent to regulate the problem of unsolicited email communications; and (2) whether any effective spam legislation can be proposed which is also likely to survive scrutiny under subsection 2(b) of the Charter. This paper concludes that Canada's Parliament is competent to enact legislation targeting the unsolicited nature of spam, and that spam legislation can be effective while also surviving Charter scrutiny as a section 1 demonstrably justified limitation upon the section 2(b) Charter rights of spammers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".