Thank you.
I've been ready for this bill since 2004, so my main focus is to get good legislation and hear the witnesses. As I said, if we're going to have a new copyright act there has to be public buy-in and a sense of legitimacy, so we'll take the time.
That being said, I think Mr. Lake's position is interesting. It shows us in our early stages trying to deal with heritage and industry. Perhaps in industry they deal with factories and sectors where they're under unionized agreements, but it's very different when you deal with the heritage component.
Artists may belong to collectives--I've belonged to a number of different collectives over the years--but we don't have a collective agreement. We don't work in a single work environment, and we don't have defined job descriptions. Artists are in fact very much individual entrepreneurs. They represent very small collectives of organizations.
In heritage it's been standard that we have representation from ACTRA or the Writers' Guild, but in our committees we also hear on a given issue--whether it's changes in arts policy or something--from a number of different organizations and artists, because we need to get a sense of what it really means on the ground.
I've offered my support to grouping a number of these together by theme. If we have a number of single musician artists come together, I'm more than willing to put more on a panel rather than fewer. I'm not saying that people don't have the right to speak because they're members of SOCAN; that they can't speak as artists, and only SOCAN can speak for them; or because they're members of ACTRA they can't speak. I don't want to go down that road.
I think we have a good, broad witness list. We just need to group it and then get down to business. Otherwise we're going to continue to fight with each other for the next 17 weeks.