Sure. I will, Mr. Chair. Thank you so much.
What we have, and what we've been trying to do all along with Bill C-11 is present a balance between the needs and protections of consumers, and the needs of artists to get paid. Here there is an opportunity to extend this resale right to visual artists, which is something that artists in about 30 countries have already.
This is a very specific and limited right. Our proposal is a 5% royalty on public resale of works priced over $1,000, but there is a ceiling. This would just pertain to those works that are sold at auctions. We're not talking about if I had a painting and I wanted to sell it to my friend across the way, Mike Lake; this would be sales that were adjudicated in....
Now if you take, for example, aboriginal artists. Many aboriginal artists sell their work the first time for very little money, and then the next sale of their work is significantly higher.
We have one example. Canadian artist Tony Urquhart sold his painting, The Earth Returns to Life, in 1958, for $250. It was resold by an auction house in 2009 for $10,000. By this amendment he would have been able to recoup $500. Now this isn't a huge amount of money, but we've been trying to say all along in this process that the life and business of artists—essentially small businesses and micro-businesses—depend on these small incremental royalty payments.
This is how the small business of the arts and culture industry is practised for many artists in Canada. That's why we think this is a very solid, simple plan. It's one that will see Canada join with about 30 other countries, including the U.K., France, and Germany.
It would enable Canada to enter into reciprocal agreements with those nations to allow an international system of compensating visual artists for the resale of their works. As we know, there are many Canadian artists whose works are selling abroad. We want to be able to create some sort of reciprocity here, so that our artists in Canada get paid.
That's a fundamental foundation of our policy on Bill C-11.
Thank you.