Evidence of meeting #10 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
If there is no text, it's fine, but if there is, we will ask for a translation.
12:30 p.m.
Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Assistant Professor, Department of History, Brock University, As an Individual
[Inaudible--Editor]...the graphic and refer to it when I get....
Anyhow, as I was saying, I am a Canada research chair in digital humanities and an intellectual historian.
Both roles lead me to suggest that we now live in a period that is as important as the early 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press.
Due to the development of new software, the Internet, new platforms and methods for information display, new methods for interaction with the computer, and ever more powerful computers, we are entering into a period that will fundamentally change the way we communicate. We won’t dispense with the book, and we won’t abandon print, but we will supplement the letter and the number with new instruments for representation that have different capacities, and supplement the book with new containers that store, display, and distribute content.
My purpose as a scholar is to adapt to this new expressive universe and help my colleagues to do the same. Our challenge as a country is, similarly, to adapt and help Canadians to do the same. It will mean expanding our definition of literacy. It will demand a redesign of the workflows we use and the tools we aggregate to produce knowledge.
And it will demand an overhaul of the institutions we use to store and archive knowledge. The library at the start of the 22nd century will likely be a very different place from the one we now know and will be filled with four-dimensional virtual objects and books that communicate with each other.
To put some substance to these assertions, let me describe two trends in computing and computing applications that are changing and will continue to change the way we communicate. The first trend is the topographic revolution, while the second is convergence.
The topographic revolution is a term I use to draw a parallel with a cultural shift described by media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and print historians such as Elizabeth Eisenstein.
In their writings, they argue that European scholars, in the wake of the printing press, were faced with a revolution in practice, expression, and even thought that was so transformative that it later came to be known as the typographic revolution. Scholars worked in conjunction with printers to devise solutions to the expressive and practical problems presented by the printing press, devising work practices and formalisms used to support the production of books and journals.
I suggest that humanities scholars and others today face a similar problem. We are confronted with new instruments for representation that we don’t know how to use, forms of representation that have some or all of the following properties: they are topographic, meaning they have two- and three-dimensional shape; they are dynamic, meaning they move; and they are autonomous, meaning they perform behaviours independent of any direct manipulation by their programmer or author. Their effect is akin to words self-organizing themselves into sentences.
From the standpoint of someone who works in the humanities and knows something of the history of human communication, these developments are incredibly important--even inspiring. But in the coming years, you, I, and the present and future generations of this country will be faced with a fundamental question: are they valuable?
We invest an enormous amount of time, treasure and infrastructure in this country to ensure that Canadians attain at least a minimal competence in the use of two instruments for representation: the letter and the number. Is a similar investment warranted to expand the expressive toolkit of Canadians to enable them to live and work with expressive forms that combine virtual reality, audio, pictures, and 2-D animations?
In my view as an educator, the answer is yes, for one very simple and important reason. People function better when they are able to perceive their environment and construct their knowledge through multiple forms of representation. They learn faster and they are able to perceive empirical patterns and conceptual relationships more easily and more quickly.
Let me offer two scenarios to describe what I mean. In the first scenario, consider what an investor does when it’s RRSP time and he or she needs to purchase a stock or mutual fund. In principle, he or she could look at a table of numbers that outlines the price of the given stock, say, over the past six months. In practice, the investor won’t.
Most of us, when making such a decision, rarely consult a table of numbers, because it’s very hard to determine the trajectory and volatility of the price for the given investment. While the information is there, we would have to abstract it by memorizing and mentally visualizing the changing stock price over time. For most of us, that requires too much work. As a result, we consult something different--a graph--that instantly shows us the information we require.
The power of visualization and multiple formalisms is also indicated by the 3-D virtual buildings project, a project I initiated while working at the National Research Council and use now as a history professor at Brock University. Put simply, the project’s aim is to accomplish two things.
The first is to provide students with the skills in 3-D modelling software needed to generate models of heritage structures, such as these ones produced by my students at Brock. One model shown is the house of William Hamilton Merritt, the founder of the Welland Canal. The other is the old courthouse in downtown St. Catharines.
teThe next animation was produced by a research assistant of mine while I was working in New Brunswick. It shows a representation of Sparks Street here in Ottawa as it looked in 1878. What you see there in the immediate foreground is essentially the area that's now occupied by the war memorial. Sparks Street extended to what was then Canal Street. This is heading down towards Elgin Street, north, then heading down Sparks Street. Most of these buildings are no longer extant except for the section of the white building there. The rest of them are no longer in existence.
Now, the project also has a second most fundamental aim, and that is to teach what I call the George Gershwin school of historiography. Do you know the opera Porgy and Bess? Set in Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1920s, the work, among other things, features a not very reputable character named Sportin' Life, who expresses his belief that holy writ hasn't got it quite right, that it's just too much to believe that little David fought big Goliath, who then “lay down and dieth”.
My aim as a historian and as a teacher is to make my students, at least in this respect, more like Sportin' Life. When they arrive at my university and in my classroom, far too many of them treat history books and the printed word generally as if they were holy writ. My job is to get them to the point where they, like Sportin' Life, say that It Ain't Necessarily So.
My job is to get them to a point where they realize that a representation of the past cannot be identified with the object to which it refers. The problem is to get them to believe it.
Most university students are the product of a public school system that rewards them for their ability to repeat content, not critically assess it. Repetition is a form of work that many like and wish to continue. Further, since most obtain their history from books, articles, and lectures, they are rarely afforded the opportunity to learn the true history of historical representations.
Historical works are not transparent windows to the past. They are arguments. They rest on the assumptions and reasoning of the historians who construct them, and they rest on the documentary and material traces that our forebears left us. These sources can tell us a great deal about the past, but the view they offer is ever partial, sometimes misleading, subject to misinterpretation, and often maddening in its capacity to withhold the one item of information that the historian wants.
The purpose of the 3-D virtual buildings project is to provide students with a deep understanding of the uncertainty that is part and parcel of the historian's craft. Toward that end, it asks them to construct a historical artifact and to pursue a course of instruction in which they literally see the challenges associated with historical reconstruction.
For example, in our tutorial, we present students with the following scenario related to the structure shown, the building of James Hope, an Ottawa stationer situated on the corner of Sparks and Elgin streets in the 19th century. To my knowledge, there is no photograph or drawing that indicates what this wall looked like. It's a common problem in architectural history.
For that matter, gaps in data are a common problem for the entire discipline of history. The only solution to it, as we tell our students, is to make an informed inference based on the construction practices in architectural conventions of the time and to accept the proposition that there are some things that we will never definitively know.
Moving on, the second trend to which I would like to direct your attention is convergence. Convergence, as I understand it, refers to the process that is shaping the evolution of the tools, software, and forms of expression that we currently employ. Put simply, it suggests that tools that were once separate can and should be brought together and repurposed to enhance the capabilities of their users.
It is this process that explains why your phone now works like a computer and why forms like the musical staff are now being used to support the composition of virtual worlds. It is in Canada's interest to contribute to this process. We have done it before.
Consider, for example, the geographic information system, the Canadian invention that merges maps with database technology and which is now used to support applications ranging from cartography to urban planning and emergency management. It is my belief that we will do it again and that our contributions will only be limited by the imagination and resources that Canadians are able to bring to bear.
To appreciate the potential of convergence, I'd like to present a storyboard that treats a former representation that I care about: augmented reality. Augmented reality, or AR, is based on the human practice of annotating our environment to support, among other things, navigation, recreation, and decoration.
The key difference is the form of annotation. Instead of marking the environment with texts or signs, AR uses computer-generated 3-D objects similar to those you would find in a virtual world. Users perceive these objects using devices ranging from see-through head-mounted displays to iPhones.
It is hard to overestimate the potential impact of this form of representation on human practice. Applications have been identified to domains ranging from construction to interior design. Contractors, for example, could use AR to show clients a proposed design on a building site, to show how the structure will blend in with the surrounding environment. Interior decorators could use the sky as a canvas to decorate institutions ranging from restaurants to churches.
My colleague Blair MacIntyre, a Canadian who, alas, is working at Georgia Tech, is one of the leading researchers in AR today. He is working to integrate AR into computer games, the first application domain in which AR will likely play a major role.
AR is an exciting technology, but it is also a new technology, akin in some ways to television in the 1930s. The image quality is rudimentary, and we need reliable, light-weight platforms and displays capable of representing and displaying AR objects. When the requisite technologies are developed, however, the impact of AR will be profound.
My interest in AR has always centred on how historians might apply it to support their expression. Toward that end, in prior work I've created a storyboard that considers how AR might be combined with a second emerging technology, e-paper, to create a novel platform to support historical representation. E-paper is a display technology that is light, flat as paper, and can be affixed to walls or whatever surface the user desires. It also has the potential to display the same content as a TV or computer monitor can now.
In this scenario, a historian 50 years from now, say, appropriates a football field for the purpose of composing and displaying a work devoted to Canadian urban history, one in which city structures and all their constituents are displayed in their actual historic size. To support this end, the historian constructs a platform composed of a wearable computer and a see-through head-mounted display akin to glasses. The computer is capable of generating AR objects and responding to the verbal and gestural commands of the historian. The platform is finally composed of a perimeter wall, one in which the surface facing the football field has been completely covered with e-paper.
At the start of this scenario, the historian enters the football field to begin a new chapter devoted to the history of Ottawa in the 19th century. Happily, he is not in a position where he has to start from scratch. In his time, he will have access to libraries of free open-sourced 3-D objects and representations, including the one he seeks: a representation of 19th century Sparks Street, which he can modify to suit his purposes.
To start his representation, the scholar begins by bringing the materials he needs on screen and on site. He starts by importing the AR representation, which emerges into the bounded space before him. However, given that the purpose of his platform is to produce a representation in which the 21st century is occluded from view, including the wall surrounding him, the historian supplements his representation by activating virtual reality representations of neighbouring sections of Sparks Street, representations that merge seamlessly with the AR representation in front of him. He does so by turning on the display screens affixed to the platform walls, as I'm showing here.
Once the historian has imported these objects into his space, he will be in a position to begin his narrative, and there is much that he will need to do. He will need to populate the space with the objects, profound and prosaic, that shaped Ottawa city life in the 19th century. He will need to fill the space with animate objects, the people and animals that populated this city some 130 years ago. He will need to construct a narrative, one that points to the social, economic, and cultural forces that touched Ottawa and played a role in changing the city’s morphology, economy, and populace.
Our historian will be a busy man. But as we leave him to his task, we might briefly consider, in conclusion, what we can do in the here and now to make his life, and those of his contemporaries, a little easier.
To be sure, this committee has many important short-term concerns to consider as it weighs Canada’s place in the digital era. How do we protect our citizens’ privacy? How do we protect this country’s intellectual property? How can we ensure that Canada retains a cultural presence in an increasingly interconnected planet?
These are important concerns, but it would be a shame to let them overshadow other more long-term questions, questions that, in essence, can be boiled down to a single one: how do you change a culture? How do you change a culture from one in which people predominantly use text to one in which people use 3-D and other multimedia objects to influence how they think, learn, communicate, make art, do business, worship, and play?
There are no easy answers to this question, but a few, at least, can be anticipated.
To start, Canadians will need access to easy, intuitive methods to generate multimedia content similar to the one our historian enjoyed. The more user-friendly the method for content generation, the more people will participate.
Second, Canadians, like our historian, will need access to digital content that can be re-purposed to meet their needs.
Finally, they will need access to computational power—lots of it.
It's for this reason that I am in strong agreement with SSHRC president Chad Gaffield. He rightly noted in his presentation to this committee last October that Canada's adaptation to the digital era will not be propelled by people like us. It will be led by its youth.
If we are to help that generation survive and thrive, we would do well to begin by making the targeted investments called for by President Gaffield: investments to support the creation and distribution of digital content; investments to support the definition and development of digital literacies in this country, including user-friendly methods for content generation; and investments in computing infrastructure to support the expressive and analytical needs of Canadians in the years and decades to come.
With that, Mr. Chair, I will conclude my presentation. My thanks to you and this committee for your time and kind attention.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
We've gone quite a bit over time here, so we're going to be short on time for questions.
We'll go to Mr. Anderson.
I didn't want to interrupt you.
I think from now on we won't do any powerpoint presentations, because we have to stick to 10 minutes.
Mr. Rodriguez.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Pablo Rodriguez Liberal Honoré-Mercier, QC
On a point of order, I have a meeting to go to at one o'clock because I'm also the Quebec caucus chair. I just want to make sure that if I leave around one, we will not be discussing motions or anything.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
There will be no committee business today after our presentations. Again, it's short. We have witnesses and we have to get them going.
Mr. Anderson, could you start, please?
12:50 p.m.
Steve Anderson Founder and National Coordinator, OpenMedia.ca
Thanks for having me here. My name is Steve Anderson. I'm the co-founder and national coordinator of OpenMedia.ca. I also write a monthly syndicated column called “Media Links”, about media, culture, and technology.
OpenMedia.ca is a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization and public interest network working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada. OpenMedia represents a growing network of independent media and civil society groups.
Some of you may also know me from SaveOurNet.ca, a project of OpenMedia.ca. SaveOurNet is a broad-based coalition of citizens and over 115 businesses and public interest groups working to protect the Internet's level playing field or “net neutrality”.
I think the timing for this meeting couldn't be better. The media and culture industries are transforming before our eyes. It's an exciting time to reimagine our media ecology in Canada. I believe it's a unique moment in history.
Last fall, the CRTC developed new traffic management guidelines. However, under these new guidelines, the CRTC will not enforce its own framework. Instead, the onus falls on the consumer to file a complaint and prove that an ISP is unjustly throttling their Internet connection.
It is unfair to force consumers to somehow obtain the technical and policy expertise to make their case effectively before the CRTC. To truly have an open Internet, either we'll need the CRTC to be mandated to conduct regular traffic management compliance audits, or we'll need a net neutrality law.
While we wait for that, the use of BitTorrent, one of the most radically democratic enablers of grassroots cultural production, is being systematically stifled by ISPs. I'm thrilled to see that the Canada Media Fund is planning to support experimental media, but I think it's odd to fund experimental media and at the same time allow ISPs to prevent media makers from using a key distribution tool like BitTorrent. This was a point made well at the CRTC's traffic management hearings by creator groups like ACTRA and the CFTPA.
As someone who was previously an independent video producer, I relied on BitTorrent for my own media production. This is what motivated me to get involved in this issue. In the early days of YouTube, I produced a mini-documentary. I was armed with no formal education in video production, and had no resources, but I was able to use free software and the open Internet--BitTorrent specifically--to produce and distribute my video.
That video has now been viewed over one million times online and broadcast on satellite and cable TV in the U.S. The same video also kicked off my professional video production career.
The reason I'm telling you all of this is that I really want to hammer home the point that the open Internet is the best training ground for professional cultural production. Any limit on BitTorrent is a limit on free expression and cultural production, and letting ISPs limit our access to such online services is indeed a slippery slope. There's a question that I think we need to ask ourselves: is it worth the risk?
Consider for a moment all of the great open Internet Canadian success stories we could lose. Michael Geist and others who have come before you have mentioned some of the exciting success stories in music, software, book publishing, and video production, so I won't get into all those, but I will mention some, including some new ones.
The NFB's screening room is a huge success, obviously, with 1,500 pieces of video and 3.7 million online film views in the first year. Now, imagine if they lost the ability to distribute these videos.
The CBC is hugely successful with digital media as well. CBC Radio 3 is a boon for independent musicians, operating like a MySpace for Canadian music culture.
The CBC is responsible for two of the most exciting digital video experiments in Canada: Zed TV and Exposure. Zed functioned much like a multi-platform Canadian YouTube, before YouTube existed.
Another Canadian media success story is The Tyee, an online independent news website in B.C. It is the recipient of top journalism prizes in Canada and the U.S. The Tyee has launched several innovative crowd-source initiatives, including its “Green Your Campbell Cash” website, which allows people to post their ideas and initiatives for tackling climate change through collective spending and action.
Another important success story is Rabble.ca, which is a national independent multimedia news organization that has been exploring innovative participatory journalism projects using social media. One of its initiatives, called “You Ask”, invites participants to drive video interviews with newsmakers by posing questions in real time through its online chat feature.
It's important to remember that most of these independent projects are past the start-up mode now. While they have been successful, they struggle for survival. I think it's important to acknowledge that these projects wouldn't be around without the open Internet, and that needs to be safeguarded. But it's also important to figure out ways to financially support independent media and cultural creators in Canada.
I know that Heritage Canada is currently exploring how to bring something like the Canada Magazine Fund to online publications. This is a great idea.
In the Netherlands, which is a good example of how this could work, non-profit media associations receive government funding in proportion to their membership numbers. It's a very hands-off, independent source of funding for cultural creators. I'm hoping that Heritage Canada will come up with something similar and support online media in relation to membership numbers, using some kind of needs-based formula.
The Canada Media Fund is also currently undergoing a consultation process with industry to define its priorities. But from what I've heard, much of the independent media world isn't being invited to contribute to this process, which is a shame.
Big media outlets like CTV, CanWest, and Rogers, on the other hand, have guaranteed envelopes of millions of dollars. I'm wondering why a Media Fund dedicated to innovation and a leveling of the playing field provides guaranteed envelopes of cash to old media empires.
Furthermore, I'm wondering why neither the public nor media innovators have really been consulted in that process. We're talking about something like $130 million of actual tax dollars here. The Canada Media Fund would best fulfill its mandate if it focused on independent and public media rather than private broadcasters.
I'd like to reiterate what Jeff Anders, from The Mark, told you when he was here:
It's the very small organizations, the ones that are really high risk, that are figuring things out. Helping those companies and organizations is really the place where we need to focus our efforts.
I couldn't agree more with those sentiments.
In a similar vein, another great way to support culture in a digital environment would be to liberate the community media trust to local media innovation centres. Until now, cable companies have been using this public trust, which is collected through a cable levy, for their own commercial interests.
As most of you probably know, right now this is the subject of a CRTC public hearing that I'll be testifying before later this week. At stake is $100 million dollars a year collected through a cable levy for community expression. If the CRTC rules in favour of liberating the funds, it may not directly support professional Canadian cultural production, but creating local platforms for media innovation and citizen cultural production will invigorate the sector from the ground up. And there won't be any additional cost to the government or taxpayers, because it's already being collected. It's just being misused at the moment.
In terms of broader priorities, such as access to digital media, all roads point to the need for a national digital strategy. In recent years, Canada has gone from being a leader in Internet technology and adoption to being an Internet laggard. We have fallen behind many European and Asian countries in terms of Internet access, speed, and cost, causing Canada to drop from second to tenth place among the 30 OECD countries.
A recent Harvard study makes the situation yet more salient, concluding, and I quote: “Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures”.
Canada badly needs a national broadband plan that ensures universal high-speed Internet access, and I think the broadband plan will need to be part of a made-in-Canada digital strategy, one that takes the best from what other countries are doing and adds to it our unique talents. A centre point of that digital strategy should be open access. If you ask any of the experts in networking technology.... Yochai Benkler from Harvard was just up here, and he said that open access is what produces a competitive landscape and what will bring costs down for Internet access.
As I'm sure you all know, Tony Clement recently announced a national consultation on Canada's digital economy strategy, which I think is a great first step. The policies that come out of that consultation should address issues like these: broadband access; Internet openness, or Internet neutrality; open access rules; support for Canadian culture, media, and telecommunications ownership; and mobile Internet costs competition openness.
These are the issues at the top of Canadians' checklist in terms of digital strategy. All of these areas have been subject to policy neglect and we'll need to ensure that the consultation captures the imagination, creativity, and ingenuity of people from across Canada. I'm talking about face-to-face meetings rather than simply taking online responses to pre-selected questions.
I should also say going into this consultation that it's been revealed that there has been basically a year of telecommunications government meetings with clients and Stephen Harper, and that makes me nervous about how this is being set up. I think this should be a citizen-driven process, not an industry-driven process.
1 p.m.
Conservative
1 p.m.
Founder and National Coordinator, OpenMedia.ca
Okay.
I think it's worth making the extra effort here. After all, this is a truly historic opportunity to remake our media system and reinvigorate Canadian cultural production for a digital era. I think it's worth a little extra effort.
1 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
With that, our time is up for this meeting. I apologize that we had a vote in the House that shortened everything up today. It's going to be my suggestion that if anyone around the table has any questions to ask of our last two presenters, through the clerk--
Mr. Del Mastro.
1 p.m.
Conservative
Dean Del Mastro Conservative Peterborough, ON
If I might make a suggestion—I don't know how tight members' schedules are—maybe we could just have a quick two-minute round.
1 p.m.
An hon. member
Or we could have one question each.
1 p.m.
Conservative
1 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
You could have one question each? I don't have a problem with that.
If we can do that, if we can make our questions relatively straightforward to our presenters, then go ahead.
Ms. Dhalla, go ahead please.
1 p.m.
Liberal
Ruby Dhalla Liberal Brampton—Springdale, ON
I want to thank both of you, first of all, for taking the time to come before the committee.
John, especially, your presentation was very futuristic and where we need to be as a country, so thank you very much for giving us a little bit of vision and insight.
I have a very quick question because we're running short on time. As we look at the study on new and emerging media, if you could provide us with one recommendation that you think the federal government needs to implement in terms of its policy to ensure we can meet the demands of this emerging market moving forward, what would it be?
Steve mentioned in his presentation that it was the posting of his video that sort of gave him his start.
Could both of you, John and Steve, perhaps give us a recommendation?
1:05 p.m.
Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Assistant Professor, Department of History, Brock University, As an Individual
That's a very good question, and not necessarily an easy one to answer. As I indicated at the end of my presentation, changing a culture is not an easy thing.
The best thing I can suggest is that we need to find a way to impart these skills to our students at both the high school and university levels. I can't pretend to know what the specific mechanisms would be to enable that to occur.
I would love to be at a point where, when I'm dealing with my undergraduate and graduate students, they would know how to program and how to use the computing applications for 2-D, 3-D, and so forth. I would say the central problem is finding people with knowledge to be able to thrive and to innovate. That's the central challenge.
1:05 p.m.
Founder and National Coordinator, OpenMedia.ca
I would say that there are two things that I think are most important. Besides the support for Canadian culture, which I outlined, it's also about making that neutrality enforceable somehow and having open access rules that enable a competitive Internet environment.
1:05 p.m.
Bloc
Roger Pomerleau Bloc Drummond, QC
I would like to thank you both for the very interesting presentation; it was very technical, but at the same time very good.
My question is for Mr. Anderson.
Mr. Anderson, we have received many people who gave us their recommendations on how to revitalize the digital and emerging media industry on which our current study is based. We know that we have to establish a stronger global presence in order to become more competitive, to have access to more capital, to be able to control what is going on in Canada, and to strengthen our system.
However, strengthening our system would also imply creating large corporations against which regular individuals would be powerless. One example that comes to mind is the case of Mr. Claude Robinson, who is currently in a similar situation. He is alone, battling with Cinar, a multi-billion-dollar company. While his case is valid, Robinson has so far been unable to have his grievances acknowledged.
Another example that comes to mind is that of the individuals who claim that Google has plagiarized their work. They were told by Google representatives that if they had a problem, they could sue the company. But how is one to take Google to court?
I think it is a good thing that we want to make our industries increasingly powerful. However, by doing so, we would be running the risk of making them so powerful that regular individuals would no longer be able to seek justice against them. Do you see the problem? Do you have any solutions to offer?
1:05 p.m.
Founder and National Coordinator, OpenMedia.ca
Well, I don't think there's any easy solution. There are some big groups there. I think the ones I would be most concerned about would be the telecommunications companies. I think open access rules would help--we could then diversify them a bit--and structural separation would also help as part of that.
In terms of the media companies, some of the things I said about supporting independent media and cultural creators directly and creating local media innovation.... I think that empowers the individual and the small groups.
When we were talking about the Canada Media Fund, I was arguing for moving these big envelopes, in some cases $130 million or something for CTV, and giving that to independent media and cultural producers directly rather than these big entities.
If you took my suggestions and put them into practice, I think that would definitely go a long way in empowering the smaller groups.
1:05 p.m.
Conservative
1:05 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
This is killing me, because this is a discussion we really need to have.
Quickly, Mr. Bonnett, I'm fascinated by your work and I would love to speak with you later about the possibility of using what you're doing with your students to create historical digital topographies. I think there's a phenomenal opportunity there.
Mr. Anderson, quickly, the FCC attempted to establish net neutrality rules in the United States and they were challenged, not surprisingly, by the giant cable players. They lost in court because the language under the FCC wasn't clear enough. The CRTC has said they have the tools to maintain access, to allow the smaller players, to allow innovation.
The NDP doesn't think the act is sufficient. We have recommended changes to section 36. Do you think we need to move towards codifying the elements of net neutrality to give the CRTC clear direction?
1:10 p.m.
Founder and National Coordinator, OpenMedia.ca
Yes, I think we do. I would also disagree that the CRTC has the tools. They have the tools if someone enforces them and wins the argument, but like I said, it's not a very fair battle right now. I could go every few weeks and lodge a complaint to the CRTC, but I'm going up against some of the biggest companies in Canada. And I have an organization, so what about individuals? They can't win those battles.
I don't think it's a fair set-up right now, and I think that codifying it.... I think something has to be done, either through mandating the CRTC to take a more active approach that involves them taking action rather than consumers, or what you have suggested.