My name is Andrew Martin. I'm the director of the Centre for Equitable Library Access and I'm assisting Victoria with her presentation.
The reason for the request is that there is a significant cost to producing materials in a format that people like Victoria, say, or Craig can use. They can't read a regular book. Nor is the kind of e-book that you might order on Amazon going to meet their needs, because it isn't accessible. We could explain in more detail what that means, perhaps at a later date, but it isn't accessible.
They need material in a specially formatted file—Daisy audio is the most common one—and these books can cost anything up to $2,000 to $2,500 to produce. You need the original material, ideally with an electronic file. There are costs in obtaining that. Narrators need to be paid. There are the production costs.
Basically, we've isolated the total production cost as being somewhere north of $3 million a year. We are asking the Government of Canada to supply that cost because it doesn't fall into the category of library service. I hope that answers your question.