Mr. Chair, I think I'm going to have enough time to share some of it with Mr. Bernier.
I'd like to start with a bit of a statement. It seems to me that artists, record producers, people right across the country are split into two groups on this. This I think goes back to Mr. Angus's point. There are groups that believe that by re-establishing a marketplace, you will drive income opportunity and investment into the record industry and you will save the record industry. That's what we heard from the first panel. Then there are those who say that you can't rebuild an industry, that there will never be an industry and the only way we can do it is to slap fees and levies on things.
By the way, a tax or a levy, they are the same thing. It's a fee placed on consumers. They are exactly the same thing. Ultimately, if you pay a tax, it goes to health care. People know where taxes go. They go to health care, to education. People understand that. But people do reject paying higher taxes even though they know that they are going to end up in health care, education, defence spending, foreign affairs and all sorts of things. People know that's where their tax dollars go. They just object to paying more when it has an impact on their household.
I'm just going to make a comment and then I'm going to pass this over to Mr. Bernier. Let us say there is a retail bakery and it sells bread. People go into the bakery and rather than pay for the bread, they just take it off the shelf and walk out the door. We have a law against that. It's called shoplifting. We say that people may not do that. People who take the bread without paying are charged.
It seems there is a contrary approach for intellectual property, which is a property just like anything else. We believe we can re-establish a marketplace.
Nine hundred and seventy one million dollars have been wiped out of the film industry. Three quarters of a billion dollars have been wiped out of the recording industry. For the film industry and the recording industry, almost $2 billion has been wiped out. That's got to be close to 20,000 jobs in Canada that don't exist.
What we're saying is that if somebody comes in and takes something, we're going to wipe out the enablers. The top five pirate sites in the world are operating in Canada. We're going to shut them down. That's the intent of this bill, so that people go back to the marketplace and buy things.
We don't go to the bakery and say, now, we're just going to let people keep on taking bread, and we're just going to charge a levy somewhere else to reimburse you for the bread that people are just taking. Secondly, we certainly wouldn't say to them, oh, by the way, I notice that you made a sandwich with that bread; we're going to need an extra 15ยข, because you've just shifted the format.
I'll pass the rest of my time to Mr. Bernier.