Canadian Heritage committee  First, let me thank you for giving us the opportunity to appear before you today and briefly talk about this industry, which has really evolved over time. I will do the first part of my presentation in French and the second part in English. My name is Martin Carrier. I am a prou

Canadian Heritage committee  Our association, ESAC, Entertainment Software Association of Canada, has been supportive of the bill. What it speaks to for us particularly is the protection of intellectual property, which is paramount in our industry. We invest millions of dollars in creating or sustaining bran

Canadian Heritage committee  Exactly.

Canadian Heritage committee  We have no direct interface.

Canadian Heritage committee  We certainly hope so. What I can tell you is that when we started working on our Montreal or other studio expansion, the Canadian dollar was at 80¢ on the American dollar. Now we are at par. We've been lucky to have great support programs through the multimedia tax credit, espec

Canadian Heritage committee  If I may add to that, I think video games are a great untold Canadian story in a way. We are a massively successful industry, which has its challenges of course, but it's a great industry that helps Canada establish itself around the world. This morning I read something in La Pre

Canadian Heritage committee  Warner Brothers is not directly in the games business, certainly, but one thing I'd like to note is you talked about the Canada media fund and that's been great in supporting smaller companies than us, that are starting out, some people who actually break out on their own and loo

Canadian Heritage committee  We have bursary programs through the universities. That's how we support this—

Canadian Heritage committee  Sure. Obviously, just to state it again, intellectual property is what we invest in. It's our brands. It's how we create content. It's really paramount to our business. Certainly we look for protection across the board as far as IP is concerned, and especially online. Sometimes

Canadian Heritage committee  For us, our games are developed in French and English. In fact, all the games made in Montreal are in both languages. It is very important for us and important for our employees who speak English, French and a multitude of other languages. They come from all over, mainly Canada,

Canadian Heritage committee  With all entertainment, it should be done in good measure. It's entertainment, but it's also sports. You have guys who are training for a marathon and then end up with shin splints. It's really an individual responsibility to mix it up with either different entertainment or diffe

Canadian Heritage committee  It's a fairly classic sort of bell curve, as far as the number of people working on it. We start with a small core team, where all sorts of design, art, and technology are involved, and then that core team goes through its proof of concept. Then it's approved and we ramp up. We h

Canadian Heritage committee  Obviously, we hire a lot of actors. It's a little different for Warner Brothers because a lot of the characters we use have their own set voices. With Bugs Bunny, I can't always—

Canadian Heritage committee  Exactly. We kind of revive him for a weekend. Sometimes we use tracks when we know exactly where the dialogue will go. We use the local talent unions. The UDA in Montreal, for example, will give us local voice talent that we can use.

Canadian Heritage committee  It depends. Some of the games we're working on are smaller online games, so maybe that team will go up to 40, and you often have the same ratio of 1:1, as far as a tester is concerned.