Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
My name is, as reported, Ferne Downey. I'm a professional actor and the president of ACTRA. With me today is Stephen Waddell, ACTRA's national executive director. We support the goal of this bill to make it easier for Canadians to use technology to access contents any time, anywhere.
We also applaud the efforts this bill takes to adopt international standards to fight content theft. However, a good bill must do more than fight off those who feel entitled to something for nothing. It must also protect the rights of creators to be compensated for the legitimate use of their work.
Unlike many Canadians, creators don't get a pay cheque from a single employer. We might earn one pay cheque here and another small one over there. It's only when you add them together that we are able to make our mortgage payment and put food on the table. Bill C-32 threatens to wipe out many of these small but crucial revenue streams. It is nothing less than a full-scale attack on collective licensing by introducing a multitude of exceptions that weaken copyright.
As you heard from the Canadian Conference of the Arts last week, the bill puts at risk $126 million in annual revenues that creators and rights holders currently earn under collective licences. And this is on top of what is already lost to content theft. Killing collective licensing, in our view, is neither modern nor balanced. In a digital world, rights-holder-run societies are the only realistic way to provide practical access to users and reasonable compensation to creators. In short, this bill moves us backwards.
We have identified six specific areas where the bill must be amended.
Number one is user-generated content. It is peculiar that the government would in one part of the bill give performers long-needed moral rights, in keeping with international standards, and then on the next page take them all away with a poorly conceived mashup provision that lets users take an artist's content and do whatever they want with it. No other country in the world has a law like this. So why is Canada trying to be a world leader in stripping creators of their rights? This clause must be significantly amended or removed from the bill entirely.
Stephen.