Canadian Heritage Committee on May 25th, 2010

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

Thank you.

Mr. Ingles, I don't think there's any debate around here in terms of having digital locks, digital rights management, in terms of protecting copyright or works from being taken and bootlegged.

As you say, though, fair dealing rights are defined by the Supreme Court of Canada. They are rights that educators can use.

If a digital lock is placed on a library product or research material that abrogates those rights, how do you think we should develop our legislation to maintain the balance between using the digital lock to protect from theft but making sure that doesn't arbitrarily override rights for education, for private study, and the like?

[Ernie Ingles]

That gets into a bit of a technical and legislative view, and I'm sorry I stumbled on the issue before.

Mr. Angus, I'm not sure I'm the right person to give you a sense of what should be done. Certainly my community believes strongly, as I think you just articulated, that we have a lot of rights to use all sorts of materials in the day-to-day of what we do: educating people, research, and so on. Any limitation on those rights would severely prejudice our evolution as a society, our research capacity, and all of those kinds of things.

Certainly the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, as well as our individual members, understands and supports the notion that there has to be some protection for our creators, our publishers, and our industries such as my colleagues here today. We understand that, and we don't disagree.

But for our purposes there has to be this understanding of what we can do. Technically, legislatively, wordsmithing, I'm not sure.... Ultimately the more definition we find in legislation, oftentimes it works against us. Sometimes it's better to be a bit more vague than specific.

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

Or illustrative rather than exhaustive.

[Ernie Ingles]

Yes, exactly. Having said that, in some ways I'm not sure. Everything is interpretable, and probably we'll be interpreting whatever the wording is for years and years to come. Possibly it's going to have to be dealt with in the courts in some fashion, as it has been in many other countries.

But the principles you've outlined are our principles as well: use for those purposes for which use is essential, but protection for abuses.

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

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

We'll go now to the last question, Mr. Del Mastro, please, for five minutes.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I'll be sharing my time with Mr. Galipeau.

Mr. Jamison, I've been saying for a little while that it seems all platforms are coming together, and it seems that magazines are making the most of that. There was a time where platforms were divided up, so you had newspapers, magazines, periodicals. That was a media source. Then you had perhaps television and radio, and then along came the Internet a little while later, and these were various platforms upon which you could kind of pitch a product.

It seems that the strength in magazines, where you are finding strength today, is a hybrid model in which you're making the most of multiple platforms and still working to promote, I suppose, your base platform, but not to the exclusion of other platforms.

Is it fair to say there has been a transition to magazines to make them current, to make them hip, to conform to or meet the new platform challenges out there? Is that a fair statement?

[Mark Jamison]

It's a very fair statement. It certainly doesn't suggest that the print platform is declining or is in danger of disappearing, but it does mean that we can take the Canadian content base, and these magazine brands already reach consumers in ways a lot of other media content creators can't. We're already there on these other platforms, and it's almost like the skills are transferrable to the new platforms. They are transferrable. We simply have to learn how to do it better.

Do you have something to add to that?

[Jim Everson, Executive Director, Public Affairs, Magazines Canada]

I would only say that the policy environment has been really strategic for that purpose. Mark showed how Internet users and magazine readers are the same people. What magazines have done is very effectively extended their readership into the Internet, so that you run a story and then you have a chat room and a lot more information on the website. Then you link it back to new story ideas that come out of the first one, back in the magazine. The policy environment has been really important to creating a stability that allows magazines, then, to take risks in terms of trying to monetize on the Internet and trying to get some revenue out of the online environment. Canada--

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

To be very succinct, the way we have actually structured the funding model, as opposed to simply the Canada Post subsidy that you used to receive, has been helpful in assisting you to meet these new platform challenges.

[Jim Everson]

Absolutely. We're only at the beginning of a new Canada Periodical Fund, which, as Mark pointed out, now rewards the reader in terms of accessing magazine content online as opposed to rewarding postage costs, which is basically what the postal assistance program did in the past. It's going to really be an important tool in terms of continuing the growth you're talking about.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Galipeau.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Mr. Jamison, I have a quick question.

I saw the list of Canadian magazines you showed on the screen. Call me ill-informed, but I saw Reader's Digest on top of the list. Last time I checked, Reader's Digest was a foreign publication with a split run Canadian edition. Am I ill-informed there?

[Mark Jamison]

There's a little update on that. The way the Reader's Digest franchise works, there is Reader's Digest Canada, Reader's Digest U.S., Reader's Digest Europe. They are all quite independent. But there are other magazines, like Elle Canada, and so on, that are actually franchise operations. They buy the rights to use the name. The content in Canada is primarily Canadian. It is edited, produced, published, printed, and distributed in Canada. It's specific to Canada, but it is not a split run. It was at one point, but that all changed in the late 1990s as a result of the changes made under the Foreign Publishers Advertising Services Act.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Mr. Ingles, thank you very much for your presentation.

I have fun in libraries. I was six years on the library board at the Ottawa Public Library. I prepared a whole bunch of questions for you, but your presentation was such that you replied to my questions before I asked them. You were on point.

However, I am left with one open question, and you can burn the rest of the clock with it. What do you want us to do for you?

[Ernie Ingles]

Thank you very much for that opening. I don't know how much clock I have to burn...? One minute.

I'll waste a little bit of it to say that we share a bit of heritage. I also was a trustee of the Ottawa Public Library, from 1978 to 1983 or 1984, before I moved west.

There are a couple of things I would suggest. First of all, in all honesty, I know it's not politic necessarily to come in with one's hand out and say we need more money, but there has been very little real investment in the retrospective digitization of our heritage, particularly from our memory institutions. There has been some contribution, and I would be the first to applaud it, through the CCO program in Heritage Canada. I myself, for example, have sat on the board of the Virtual Museum of Canada for 10 years, and I've seen some great and wonderful things happen there, within that digital space. So I do think there has been an investment, but I truly, honestly think there needs to be more.

I think because we are memory institutions in that way, there also has to be more support for Library and Archives Canada, for example, to help us develop these trusted digital repositories. I know it may sound foolish to you to worry about a 500-year horizon, but that's the kind of thing we worry about, and we need to worry about it. If no one had started to worry about the print publications of the previous centuries, we'd have nothing to digitize and we'd have no heritage to look back on. So we have to look ahead, but we have to understand what it takes to look ahead, and the investment.

There are many things that we want to rely on the private sector to do for us, but there are many other things that we need public support to do.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

How much?

[Ernie Ingles]

Well, anything would be helpful. The cost of the digitization that I referred to is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no question about that. But as I said earlier, every little bit helps—$500,000 here, perhaps matched by this, that, or the other institution. That's the way we're doing it now.

Regarding the 30 million pages that I referred to at my own institution, we will be doing that without any government money. So it can be done. We have to work harder. If we had government money to leverage with some other kinds of money, it would be even more helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you. Mr. Galipeau. You did sneak one extra little question in there.

Thank you very much to our witnesses for this first part. I apologize again for our lateness in starting.

We will recess for a few minutes to get our next witnesses ready.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

I'm going to call the meeting back to order and welcome our next witnesses.

From Astral Media we have André Bureau, chairman of the board, and Sophie Émond, vice-president, regulatory and government affairs; and from Corus Entertainment Incorporated we have Sylvie Courtemanche, vice-president, government relations, and Gary Maavara, vice-president and general counsel. Welcome.

This meeting will be over at one o'clock. Again, I apologize that we had a late start in the first part here today.

Astral Media, if you would like to start, please go ahead.

[André Bureau, Chairman of the Board, Astral Media Inc.]

Good morning, Mr. Chair, committee members and staff. First of all, I would like to thank the committee for inviting Astral to participate in its study on emerging and digital media.

Astral is a Canadian media company, active in the fields of specialty and pay television, radio, new media and out-of-home advertising both in the francophone and anglophone markets across Canada. The impact of the evolution of digital media on the broadcasting sector overall is, for us, a matter of the utmost importance. We have all been witnessing an acceleration of the pace of technological change that has been causing dramatic upheaval in the means of access to content on a variety of platforms. For a business such as ours, this no doubt presents enormities—I am sorry—opportunities—

[Some voices]

Oh, oh!

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

Was that a Freudian slip?

[André Bureau]

Yes, madam, I am being well looked after this afternoon.

[Some voices]

Oh, oh!