Turning to page 4, Danielle referred to section 92 of the Copyright Act, which required that the government table a report on the operations and provisions of the act. That section also required that once tabled in Parliament, it be referred to an appropriate committee for its study and that the committee would then be required to provide its own report.
In fact, the report--I have a copy here, and some of you may recall it from your time on the committee back in 2002--was referred to the heritage committee, this committee. The committee began to examine it in the spring of 2003, and actually in great earnest, I would say, in the fall of 2003, and this led to certain reports.
I want to put the document into context a little bit. I think one of the reasons for the inclusion of section 92 in the act was to recognize the significance of the changes brought about by Bill C-32 in 1997. It was felt that at the end of five years it would be opportune to re-examine the impact of those changes.
But at the same time, the government, in tabling the report, had a number of objectives in mind. The first thing they did was, in recognition of the complicated process of amending the act, which often seemed to result in some level of controversy and acrimony, try to streamline the process by which future amendments to the act might occur.
So what the report proposed was that rather than undertaking a large omnibus type amendment in the future, the government would propose perhaps smaller step-by-step amendments, and they would try to group amendments in some way thematically. So the first thing the report did was to affirm a kind of step-by-step approach in the interests of perhaps improving the efficiency with which the act could be amended.
The second thing it sought to do was to demonstrate that there were still a lot of issues that stakeholders were calling on the government to try to resolve. So it provides a catalogue of...it depends on how you count them, but some would say up to about 70 different issues that the government was asked to have addressed.
Then the report tackles those issues by trying to group them based on a certain maturity, I guess, or a priority as far as the government is concerned. It tries to group them into short-term priorities, medium-term priorities, and long-term priorities. In a sense, the short-term priorities are described generally in terms of what ultimately came out in Bill C-60; namely, it looked at certain Internet-driven issues, the need to re-examine the level of protection in the Internet environment to look at the way intermediaries like Internet service providers are dealt with, and how educational institutions and other not-for-profit public institutions should be able to utilize the Internet to manage or further their objective.
That's what the report did, in a nutshell.
I have just one further word. It goes without saying, of course, that this is the document of the past government, and to date, there's been no endorsement by the present government.