Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for allowing us to appear today and to speak to you on behalf of both our company and our industry.
My name is Suzanne Hitchon, and I'm here with John Fisher. Together we are representing Criterion Pictures, a division of Visual Education Centre, one of the largest distributors of audiovisual materials in Canada. Our company focuses on the distribution of curriculum-based materials for in-classroom educational purposes. We have been in business since the 1960s.
Our industry provides a vast array of audiovisual content that covers all grade levels and all subject matters in both of Canada's official languages. We are here today on behalf of an entire industry that may very well cease to exist should Bill C-11 pass into law.
We operate independently of government subsidies, and our industry as a whole employs more than 8,000 Canadians.
For more than 50 years, our industry has been providing a highly valued service at fair market prices to educational institutions, while at the same time contributing $30 million to $50 million in annual revenue to the Canadian economy. Like many private industries and small businesses in Canada, we have certainly faced our fair share of challenges. We've had to adapt to change and take financial risks, adjusting to new technologies and budgetary constraints while at the same time meeting the needs of our customers as they have demanded increased services at lower prices. This is the reality of the private sector.
In recent years our company alone has invested millions of dollars of our own money to build a K-to-12 digital delivery platform comprising more than 25,000 audiovisual curriculum-based programs to meet the needs of our customers. Through all this change, we have survived and grown without government support or financial assistance. However, since the inception of this industry sector, nothing has posed a greater threat to its continued existence, to our very livelihood and our lifelong investment, than the passing of this new legislation in its current form. Should Bill C-11 pass in its current state, it will have catastrophic consequences for both our business and that of our industry.
As currently written, Bill C-11 will eliminate requirements for educational institutions to pay for copies of materials they currently license from us, representing a direct loss of millions of dollars in revenue and effectively putting us out of business. The current legislation places a new reverse onus on our industry to monitor more than 15,000 schools throughout Canada for violations—an impossible task. Additionally, it subsequently reduces penalties for damages and eliminates all requirements for record-keeping.
These new conditions in Bill C-11 will lead to an overall loss of jobs and investment and a decline of Canadian content, as most financial incentives for private investment are now removed. As a result, students and teachers will become more dependent on U.S.-produced cinemagraphic works, as Canadian product will be difficult to find.
The government will ultimately need to fill the gap by providing more taxpayer funding to organizations such as the National Film Board of Canada and/or the CBC, if it feels Canadian programs have any value.
The passing of Bill C-11 in its current form is of benefit to neither the non-theatrical industry like us nor the Canadian educational community. There is no winner. Educators are not asking to be exempt from the current copyright provisions, but that is what this bill prescribes. This was clearly outlined during the testimony of the Council of Ministers of Education during the previous Bill C-32 committee hearings, when the chair of the CMEC, the Minister of Education for Nova Scotia, stated and I quote:
We are not asking for anything for free. The education system, the sector, pays for licences and copyright, and will continue to do so. What we are asking for with these amendments is to have things clarified.
Ms. Rosalind Penfound, deputy minister of the CMEC, testified:
Our assessment is that each year across Canada there's likely more than a billion dollars spent by the education sector to pay creators for their books, movies, art, etc.... We would not anticipate that this bill would in any way reduce the amount of money the education sector would be putting into these efforts.
Finally, this is from Ms. Cynthia Andrew, from yesterday's testimony, from the Canadian School Boards Association:
...it has been suggested that the education community does not want to pay for education materials, and this is incorrect. Education institutions currently pay for content and for copying of these materials.... CSBA is not suggesting, nor have we ever proposed, that school boards should not pay for intellectual property.
That's the end of the quote.