Canadian Heritage Committee on May 25th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

I call this meeting to order. This is meeting number 16 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this is a study on emerging and digital media, opportunities and challenges.

Mr. Rodriguez first and then Ms. Lavallée.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Since the committee is supposed to debate the motions that are in order, particularly the one put forward by Ms. Lavallée, and out of respect for the witnesses who are already here, may I suggest, Mr. Chair, since the committee is not sitting on Thursday, that we immediately set aside some time to discuss these motions next Tuesday. Moreover, we could start with that, and in this matter, the issue will be resolved. We could postpone these debates out of respect for the witnesses who are here today and, at the same time, we will ensure that these motions are dealt with.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Madame Lavallée.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Indeed, if we deal with these motions at the beginning of next Tuesday's meeting, for a reasonable length of time, from 10 to 15 minutes—I believe that Mr. Del Mastro wants to debate them—that would be acceptable, even though the rules state that these motions should be discussed today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Del Mastro.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I think that's a reasonable compromise to get this dealt with.

I do want to put on the record that once again our committee is starting 14 minutes after 11. It's unacceptable. The previous committee didn't leave the room until well past five after 11. It gives us no time to set up. We have witnesses here today. We're already working on a tight schedule. We have motions that a member would like to have dealt with. By the way, her right to have those motions dealt with is within our Standing Orders, and we need to make compromises so we can fit things in.

I want it officially brought to the attention of whoever it is who oversees the committees that this is still not working and we need a resolution. That other committee should be starting 15 minutes earlier than it is.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We'll take that upon ourselves again. I thought it was rectified. We'll send a letter to the whips to make sure. We sent a letter two weeks ago. We'll send another one.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

It's still in the mail.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Yes.

Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I would like to fully support Mr. Del Mastro. We have raised this in the past. We're doing a fairly intensive study, and it's disrespectful to our witnesses to not have the chance to be fully questioned.

As well, I support the motion to deal with it next Tuesday. Mr. Del Mastro is correct; it is Madame Lavallée's right to have it debated now. But I think if we're all working together and we realize that to deal with a motion we need at least 15 minutes, let's plan it so we're not cutting off time from our witnesses now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Okay.

Ms. Dhalla, please.

[Ruby Dhalla, Liberal, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

I want to echo what Dean said as well. I think this is the third or fourth time we've discussed this, and we continue to be in the same boat. If necessary, I'm sure other members of the committee would also be amenable toward switching rooms, or the industry committee could do that, so we can come up with a compromise and start on time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Madame Lavallée.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I would add the Bloc Québécois' voice to that of the other parties. I will raise this matter personally with the Bloc Québécois whip, in addition to the letter that you will be sending. If everyone did the same thing, eventually things would change.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

If that doesn't work, I'll make a sign and I'll march in front of the Parliament Buildings till we get our time changed.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

You should do it in that little seal outfit. That's very effective.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

It would be really warm today.

Sorry for that, but we again welcome our witnesses and apologize. We're going to have to alter the length of your statements and answers somewhat, but we'll split it between the two. We'll cut this session by seven minutes or so.

From the Canadian Association of Research Libraries we have Ernie Ingles, and from Magazines Canada we have Mark Jamison and Jocelyn Poirier, director.

Mr. Ingles first, please.

[Ernie Ingles, President, Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta, Canadian Association of Research Libraries]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm absolutely delighted to be here.

During the day I'm the vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta. But I'm here representing the Canadian Association of Research Libraries as its president.

We're an organization of 29 of the largest university libraries in the country, but our membership also includes three federal organizations: the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Library and Archives Canada, and the Library of Parliament. Although the last three institutions do not take any part in our advocacy, they are there simply to be part of that network, which is providing Canadians with research content for their various uses.

Over the course of our 30-plus years, we've developed a capacity to partner in the research and higher education arena. We seek effective and sustainable scholarly communication activities. And we promote public policy, encouraging research and broad access to scholarly information.

We've done that over the years also by way of spinoff organizations. The three in particular that will be part of this presentation are the Canadian Institute for Historic Microreproduction, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, and an organization called Canadiana.org.

We do welcome this opportunity to participate. The issues that you're dealing with are important issues, and they are particularly important to us. Although we have our few minutes today, you will be getting an extensive brief from us that will touch on a number of areas that I won't be touching on today. But they are certainly areas that are important for your energies, issues such as digital repositories, libraries as publishers of digital materials, and, most importantly--and I'll say one or two words about it later--the archiving of digital content.

Today I want to focus, though, on what is actually question five in your inquiry, and that is looking at digital content and particularly where digital content intersects with our users--Canadians of every socio-economic grouping--and making sure those individuals have access to the emerging and digital media.

Certainly, CARL encourages government to continue its efforts to extend broadband coverage to rural and northern communities so that all Canadians can have access to that content. We encourage the federal government to continue its program of ensuring that public libraries have computers that patrons can use for their learning and civic engagement, particularly in the rural areas and in the north.

We also encourage the government to continue to support the development of the library and archives community across Canada by way of the programs of such organizations and institutions, such as Library and Archives Canada and CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information. Both are very important to our well-being.

All of these programs are important in providing the means for researchers, teachers, students, and all Canadians to obtain the information they need in their research, education, and self-development activities.

But the means of access to digital content is only one factor in the digital equation. CARL has been advocating for a long time that government has a direct role to play in providing digital content for Canadians and in so doing to protect existing materials for future generations by digitizing Canada's documentary heritage.

If you come away with one recommendation from my presentation today, it should be that the Government of Canada needs to take a leadership role in preserving Canadian heritage by investing in the digitization of Canada's documentary heritage.

Many of you know well Tom Jenkins of Open Text. He is one of Canada's entrepreneurs and part of our team. He is on the Canadiana.org board. He was quoted in The Globe and Mail a year ago or so, saying that

much of Canada's knowledge and creative output remains on shelves in books, journals, government publications, research reports, films and TV productions, and archives. Less than 1 percent is online. We must mobilize our knowledge resources while supporting and encouraging those creating new content.

The digitization of Canada's documentary heritage has been a strong interest for CARL for many years. Canada's research libraries have the responsibility for the long-term preservation of that heritage and the mandate to make it available to Canadians. Digitization is the current approach to achieving both aims.

Canada's documentary heritage is held in paper or other analog formats in libraries, archives, museums, and other facilities. Of older documents, there are few copies available and they are often in an extraordinarily fragile state.

Once scanned, the lifespan of the original is greatly increased, and the information carried by the original will survive even if the original itself does not. Digital preservation entails its own challenges, to be sure, but they seem to be more tractable than those of the long-term preservation of the physical artifact.

I would say parenthetically that with the leadership of Library and Archives Canada, plus the leadership of many of my CARL colleagues and the CARL libraries, we are developing a network of what are called trusted digital repositories across the country to ingest just the kinds of materials that we're today encouraging you to support the creation of.

The more important reason for digitizing Canada's documentary heritage is to increase access to and use of it by Canadians and by others interested in Canada. Documents dispersed across many libraries and archives are difficult to discover and difficult or expensive for a researcher to consult. Interlibrary loans of rare or fragile documents are often not possible and travel to consult items is unaffordable for many. Many of you will recognize that as the condition today--at least I hope you recognize that.

That sentiment actually was stated in 1976 in one of the royal commissions of the government of the time, which looked at the same situation that you're looking at today, except in a different medium. The medium of that time was microform. It's the same issue, though: making Canadiana accessible to all Canadians.

There are many projects under way today. I'm not trying to suggest to you that we are not without progress. Things are happening. Library and Archives Canada, as I've said, has digitized many Canadian government documents. Your own Library of Parliament has digitized the debates of the House of Commons and Senate for almost all of the 20th century.

The University of Toronto Libraries are working with others, including my own institution, the University of Alberta, to digitize millions of out-of-copyright books. My own institution, the University of Alberta, has embarked upon a digitization project of 30 million pages of early Canadiana--Canadiana published up until 1923. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec has digitized a great many collections of French language materials. As a more niche example, but an example representing a lot of things happening in the country, Simon Fraser University has a project to digitize publications relating to various immigrant groups in the country.

So a lot of things are happening, but “digitization” is a word that covers many processes. I won't go into them all today. It's complex. It's difficult. It means assigning what's called “metadata” in terms of being able to find things, indexing the text itself, and just making everything discoverable online. These are challenges, to be sure.

But they're all excellent projects and they're all precedents from which you can build a multi-institutional national project. As you can imagine, they represent a very small percentage of the voluminous number of documents that have yet to be protected. That volume is estimated to be at about 40 million titles, and we can't even estimate the amount of manuscript or archival materials we should be looking at.

The federal government has not been without a contribution, and we do want to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage. For example, in the CARL context, we had a grant of $200,000 to support the creation of a software tool that is now assisting all of our libraries in doing what I just mentioned: assigning metadata to digitized collections. I think a couple of you were actually there; I know that Mr. Uppal was there a year or so ago when we launched that. It has been used extraordinarily well.

There is a bit of irony in all of this. For some of those projects I mentioned, it's a bit of a sad reality, I guess--the University of Alberta project, for example, and the University of Toronto project--in that most of the resources for the digitization of Canadiana in those projects are coming from an American philanthropist and not from Canadian sources or the Canadian government.

We think there should be maybe be a little more investment. We don't want a Google, particularly, where we have to digitize our heritage and then buy it back. That's something we are trying to avoid if we can do so.

We note that the recently launched digital consultation mentions the need for digitization. We'll make further comments on that through the process they're engaged in.

We also believe, however, that the development and marketing of value-added services around the collections might present cost-recovery possibilities, and certainly it represents possibilities for partnerships with the private sector.

Many of those materials I mentioned just a few minutes ago are being used by educational publishers, by all sorts of individuals in the educational media exploiting what we already have digitized. And we can only assume that the more content that's out there, the more opportunity there will be for those kinds of private sector partnerships and those kinds of private sector publishers. It's a big industry and we think we can contribute to it.

The availability online of our national wealth of historical documents would be a boon to that creative sector, saving writers and other creators much time and trouble and encouraging cultural creation in and about Canada.

I want to briefly touch on the issue of copyright. The research library community firmly believes and asserts that creators should indeed be compensated for their work. The issues we project to you today with regard to retrospective digitization primarily focus on out-of-copyright materials. But we did want to suggest that CARL is in the process of compensating creators and publishers to the tune of about $250 million a year through our usage of those materials, through our purchase of those materials, and through licence fees we pay to Canada's various collectives.

As an association, we have participated in the government consultation, and we would be pleased to provide this committee with a copy of our comments. Our libraries want to be a part of the discussion when the government introduces the new copyright reform package, which we hear will be fairly soon.

We thank the heritage committee for inviting us to present today. We have appreciated the opportunity to underline for you the engagement of Canada's research libraries in the use, dissemination, and even the creation of digital media. We would be pleased to answer any of your questions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Now we move on to Magazines Canada. Who is the presenter?

[Mark Jamison, Chief Executive Officer, Magazines Canada]

That would be me. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Mark Jamison and I am chief executive officer of Magazines Canada. Jim Everson, our executive director of public affairs, is with me. Due to illness, my colleague Jocelyn Poirier sends his regrets. Jocelyn is a member of the Magazines du Québec board as well as the Magazines Canada board, and he is president of the TVA group, but unfortunately he is ill and he cannot be with us.

We appreciate that the committee is focusing on digital media. This is an environment that magazine publishers have embraced. We thank you for having us.

Canadians have benefited considerably over the years from progressive federal policies in the magazine sector. As the digital economy and new consumer demand evolve, policies need to be updated to continue to provide value to Canadian readers.

We would like to spend a few minutes talking about magazines today and tomorrow. Different monitors have the slides in French and English.

First, I have just a few words about the industry and Magazines Canada. Our national association provides advocacy, marketing, and professional development services for Canada's consumer, cultural, and business magazines. Members are mostly independent titles located in all parts of Canada, publishing in French, English, and aboriginal languages as well as many other languages.

Member magazines are Canadian owned and controlled, and that's a point we want to stress, plus the fact that most of our magazines have 80%-plus Canadian content. Together, our magazines deliver 700 million print titles annually and attract millions of readers online. The $2.2 billion Canadian magazine industry provides direct and indirect employment to some 13,000, and that includes all our creative people—writers, designers, illustrators, and so on.

Are we tanking on the French slides here?

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I would like to interrupt Mr. Jamison because we cannot follow.

It is still in English here.

[Technical Difficulty—Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Can we look at the monitors?

Okay, we have French there. Anyone on that side who wants to see it in English can maybe move around a little. We do have it up.

If that's satisfactory, we'll carry on, please.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Chair, the principle of distributing documents in French and in English has been respected. The principle has been respected. Perhaps the objective has not been achieved, but the principle has been respected. So we will be satisfied with that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Okay, thank you. It's the digital world we're in right now. That's why we're having this, so we can correct these things.

Carry on with your presentation, please. I'm sorry for the delay. We'll get some of the wrinkles ironed out here yet.