Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 30th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

This is the 127th meeting of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. We are continuing our study on remuneration models for artists and creative industries.

For our first panel, we have with us Corrie Jackson from the Royal Bank of Canada; Glenn Rollans and Kate Edwards from the Association of Canadian Publishers; and William Huffman from Dorset Fine Arts.

We'll begin with Ms. Jackson.

[Corrie Jackson, Senior Art Curator, Curatorial Department, Royal Bank of Canada]

Thank you and good morning.

My name is Corrie Jackson, and I am a senior curator at RBC. I'm responsible for overseeing and managing the RBC art collection, including acquisitions and installations of artwork globally.

The RBC art collection actively supports the work of living Canadian artists and has been collecting works since 1929. While many of our acquisitions focus on the work of emerging artists—supporting their work often before they find critical support from major museums or institutions—we also look to collect from artists of different generations who are fostering important conversations, and who are the mentors to the next generation of artists.

At RBC, we recognize the important role the arts play in supporting vibrant communities and strong economies. We also understand that support for the arts creates opportunities for many promising new artists to commit to their craft and take their careers to the next level. That is why RBC has made it a priority to help the next generation of artists progress in their careers. Our strategy provides the opportunity to raise awareness about Canada's vibrant and diverse art landscape.

Some examples of RBC's support for the arts include the following.

The RBC emerging artist project, which is overseen by the RBC Foundation, is committed to supporting young artists as they graduate and make their way to being professional practitioners. The RBC Foundation partners with institutions to support mentorship programs that help young artists in the early stages of their careers. This support is essential as young creators leave school and look to establish themselves among their peers. Since its inception, the RBC emerging artist project has helped over 8,000 artists from a variety of disciplines, and has invested over $70 million in arts organizations globally.

There is also the RBC Canadian painting competition. It was established in 1999 and has focused on helping emerging visual artists by providing them with a national forum to display their work and by opening doors to future opportunities. In addition to monetary prizing, artists are provided with support and mentorship. Each year, one national winner and two honourable mentions have their works become part of RBC's corporate art collection, which I oversee.

We partner with the Canadian Art Foundation to ensure that these young artists also receive mentorship from a jury of nationally and internationally celebrated art experts. We have partnered with organizations such as CARFAC to also ensure that these young artists receive access to information on artist compensation, copyright and the rights of an artist.

RBC's corporate art collection includes over 4,500 works by Canadian artists. RBC is collecting with an awareness that we are supporting a practice, and that this support is part of an active exchange. The works we acquire are sourced from commercial primary market galleries and help fund the time in the studio that allows for the next exhibitions, the publications, and the ability for artists to continue to engage, reflect and produce.

We collect with an awareness that an active market in Canada can strengthen the vibrancy of our communities. The stronger our arts community is nationally, the more we are cohesively engaged in creating a culture that benefits from the innovative, experimental and enriching experience that art brings to us all.

What drew me to this position personally, after working in commercial and university galleries, was seeing the unique and direct impact corporate collecting can have on the livelihood of artists. An actively acquiring collection pays artists for the work of their labour, research, time and thought, and that becomes manifested within an artwork. This opportunity is important and impactful. The Canadian primary market can be limited in scope, and the impact of corporate collections is not insignificant.

When thinking about our responsibility toward supporting artists, I often think of an ongoing study I recently read, entitled “Waging Culture”, which comes out of York University. It's a small sampling and quite limited in scope, but it offers information that I feel echoes sentiments I have heard in talking to artists across the county.

It looks at the typical experiences of a professional artist working in Canada. I want to emphasize that this is a study of artists who are actively making work and contributing to cultural dialogues, showing in museums and institutions. They are professional artists, but they are not necessarily living off the sale and display of their work alone. They are also often working other jobs. They are focused and committed to making work that is bringing new voices into our communities.

The study is broad and speaks to many of the challenges artists face. However, it also helps us understand how our acquisitions affect the livelihood of artists. The study states that the revenue for median artists in Canada, from their artistic practice, is 40% from sales, 40% from grants and 20% from artist fees, like copyright income. The yearly income for artists from all sources, including their day job, is approximately $21,000.

In both 2007 and 2012, however, the study showed that artists are not realizing any profit from their practice. In 2007, the median practice income was a loss of approximately $500, and in 2012, it was about a $400 profit. On average, the hourly income for artists was less than $2 an hour. This gives us pause to consider that it's often the artists themselves who are actively funding the production of art in Canada.

RBC's support of the arts is part of our corporate culture. The conversations sparked by artworks in our collection infuse the innovative and dynamic exchanges between our clients and our employees. As we continue to support the visual arts, we look to better understand and strengthen our relationships with visual arts organizations across Canada and understand our impact within the larger Canadian and international art market and the visual art community as a whole. We continue to look to support the diverse conversations stimulated by visual art.

Thank you for your attention. I'd be pleased to answer any questions from the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

We will now go to the Association of Canadian Publishers. We have Glenn Rollans and Kate Edwards.

[Glenn Rollans, President, Association of Canadian Publishers]

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

I'm Glenn Rollans. I'm president of the Association of Canadian Publishers, known as ACP, and co-owner and publisher of Brush Education in Edmonton. I am joined by Kate Edwards, who is the executive director of ACP.

We acknowledge that we're meeting today on the unceded traditional lands of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

ACP represents almost 120 Canadian-owned, mainly English-language book publishers across Canada, publishing in all genres for audiences around the world. We're creative partners and risk investors in books. We're not printers. We fill the role in the book world that producers play in the film world. Audiences can purchase our works, or license them under direct or collective licences, in digital and print formats. We generate important income for authors, editors, designers, illustrators, photographers and other creative professionals, and we are creative professionals in our own right.

The 2012 amendment to Canada's Copyright Act damaged our livelihoods. In particular, it opened the door to systematic and widespread unpaid copying by Canada's K-12 and post-secondary sectors. The two amendments most responsible are the inclusion of education as a purpose for fair dealing, and the reduction of statutory damages—that is, the penalties for infringement specified by the act.

Emboldened by these amendments, the education sector throughout Canada, with the exception of Quebec, abandoned collective licences and stopped paying mandatory Copyright Board tariffs. Instead, they implemented new policies advising staff and students that all copying, within the limits of the old licences and tariffs, was now available for free. The new statutory damages didn't even slow them down. Our members were shocked to learn that the only significant difference between the new policy and the old licences and tariffs was that publishers and authors would no longer be compensated.

This cynical ambush was the exact opposite of what the education sector had promised to do during the pre-amendment consultations. By opening the door to widespread unpaid uses of our works, these amendments created a threat to the existence of independent Canadian writers and publishers.

Make no mistake: They also created an urgent freedom of expression issue. If our Copyright Act leads to a Canada where the only writers and publishers who can earn a living are those with institutional salaries and those chasing Internet advertising, it will have silenced important, independent Canadian voices.

Independent Canadian publishers struggle in a home market dominated by internationally owned media. We are comparatively small entrepreneurs, yet we publish 80% of all Canadian-authored titles. Our members publish writers who might otherwise go unheard—diverse, marginalized and emerging voices. By undermining their livelihoods, the 2012 amendments have encouraged the exploitation and suppression of these authors. They have also made it less possible for publishers to take risks on developing these authors' works and finding their audiences.

As a result of the behaviour unleashed by the 2012 act, our sector has lost copying revenues of roughly $30 million per year, as determined by the PwC study of 2015. Our opportunity to sell books has also suffered because of the large free-copying zone opened up by the act. The 2015 study—which I think we have supplied to the clerk—stood up well to the 2017 scrutiny of the Federal Court of Canada.

These changes also went against Canada's international commitments under copyright conventions and treaties. Foreign users now pay Canadian authors and publishers more for copying than Canadians do. By failing to rein in copying by its education sector, Canada has cast itself as an outlier among developed nations. We have become a scavenger of published works that lacks the will to support their creation, rather than a confident creator of intellectual property in a 21st century economy.

The Copyright Act should defend Canadian creative workers against large-scale copyright users who systematically use our work for free. Thrift does not justify theft. There is no justification for treating Canada's authors and publishers as uncompensated suppliers.

The education sector argues that statistics prove the Canadian book publishing sector is doing well despite uncompensated copying. In fact, this is a flat-out misstatement of the facts. I urge you to review the information we have supplied to the clerk and to question such misstatements carefully.

Losses due to the education sector's rejection of Access Copyright licences and Copyright Board tariffs vary by publishers, but in the case of my own company, those direct losses have amounted to roughly 5% of revenues. When combined with our diminished opportunity to sell books, and with the razor-thin margins in book publishing, this has had a dramatic impact on our growth and operations. Among independent Canadian publishers, losing even 1% of revenues means lost jobs, unpublished titles, lost opportunities for today's students to work in our sector and lost contributions to Canadian education, community and culture.

The education sector also argues that copyright users are harmed when copyright creators are protected. I beg you to reject this premise in all its forms. The rights you protect for me and my colleagues are not taken away from anyone. They are protected for everyone, and protecting them benefits all Canadians.

Relicensing the education sector is not complicated. The only thing the education sector needs to change is its attitude toward what is fair. Quebec's education sector is fully licensed under collective licences, while the education sector in the rest of Canada is almost completely unlicensed. That means that Canadian authors and publishers are compensated when they are copied in Quebec but not when they are copied elsewhere in Canada. That is simply unacceptable in our federation. The easy, practical and affordable solution is for the education sector in the rest of Canada to again enter into collective licences—but they appear to need your encouragement to do so.

We were disappointed to learn yesterday that the government's plan for Copyright Board reform will not address statutory damages for our sector. This is a missed opportunity to encourage respect for the Copyright Board's decisions and to create an incentive for all parties to come back to the negotiating table. Unless this omission is reconsidered, mandatory tariffs will remain unpaid and damage to our sector will continue to mount.

I need to say clearly and bluntly that if you don't intend the damage—damage that has now gone on for years and years—you need to stop it and reverse it. We urge this committee to find the courage to say no to the short-sighted conduct of the education sector, which is so destructive to the livelihoods of Canadian authors and publishers—and in fact to the interests of educators, their students and all Canadians.

Please restore a fair marketplace where independent Canadian book publishers can earn a living and continue to make their important contributions to other creative professions and to our country.

We'll include our full set of recommendations as part of our written submission.

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. We look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

Now we will go to William Huffman from Dorset Fine Arts.

[William Huffman, Marketing Manager, West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, Dorset Fine Arts]

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

I'm William Huffman, and I represent the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, an organization with a very broad mandate but one that includes the management of copyright and permissions as it relates to Inuit artists in the region.

I'll just give you a bit of an organizational overview, to give you a sense of who we are. The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative is the oldest and most successful of the Arctic co-operatives. There is a network across the north. The organization was created in 1959 to provide resources for Inuit artists working in the community. Since its inception, the co-operative has been responsible for making possible the iconic Inuit art of Cape Dorset. The creation and sale of Inuit art is the largest and most profitable local industry in the region.

Cape Dorset is located in the territory of Nunavut, approximately 2,091 kilometres north of this room. The head office is in Cape Dorset, and since 1976 a satellite office operates in downtown Toronto, where I am based.

We are a community-owned organization; 90% of 1400 residents in Cape Dorset are shareholders. Profits are distributed back to the community in the form of annual dividends.

What we do in the context of copyright is that we manage the copyright and reproduction permissions on behalf of Cape Dorset's living artists and artists' estates. Our system is predicated on a power of attorney and appointment of agent arrangement that we negotiate with each artist, or the artist's estate representative. We are only responsible for this community. No other organization in the Canadian Arctic has the same system sophistication that exists in Cape Dorset.

For today's forum, I should note that my office regularly receives requests from artists residing in other communities for its copyright and permissions expertise. That certainly demonstrates a need for this specialized infrastructure in Canada's Arctic region for our northern creators.

Any individual or entity wishing to reproduce, in whole or in part, the likeness of a work of art produced by a Cape Dorset artist must seek authorization from the co-operative. Our office has worked with a range of stakeholders, from museums and art galleries to corporations and government.

In light of today's forum, we have ongoing federal relationships in the context of copyright and permissions with the Bank of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mint, Canada Post, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, and Global Affairs Canada, among others.

Our copyright and permissions specialist reviews the proposed use of the imagery and provides final approval on format and quality of the reproduction or depiction. The co-operative often collects a user fee based on the CARFAC copyright collective schedule and remits, minus a 20% administration fee, a dollar amount to the artist or estate. Use of imagery can relate to both print and online platforms. These can include publications, advertising initiatives and merchandising, everything from coffee mugs and umbrellas to exhibition catalogues and magazines.

Often, the approach is proactive, with requests for copyright and permissions received by my office. We then work closely with those individuals or organizations. In other circumstances, we are made aware of or we discover unauthorized image use and attempt to enforce our reproduction and fee requirements. In the case of the latter, we are often successful collecting fees and rectifying improper image use, but certainly we are limited in how aggressively we can enforce our copyright and permission terms globally.

In our 2017-18 fiscal year, we processed $137,466.78 in copyright and permission fees, remitting $109,973.73 to Cape Dorset artists and their estates.

Why do we manage this program? The artists of Cape Dorset range from the very emerging to elder creators. Many artists are challenged by a lack of home phone and Internet access. All have Inuktitut as a first language, and it is common for our more senior artists to be unilingual Inuktitut speakers. It's also common that our artists are without bank accounts and are therefore unable to accept payments under what we would consider normal circumstances.

In light of that, you can imagine how complex and challenging it is for our artists to both understand and navigate a copyright and permissions program under, again, what we would consider normal circumstances. The specific structure and administration of this copyright and permissions program by the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative makes possible a financial benefit to artists from image use while protecting the integrity of the original work by regulating and restricting its reproduction or depiction.

In closing, the distinctive structure of our organization and its collective understanding of the Inuit artist community in Cape Dorset have uniquely equipped us to manage copyright for our stakeholders.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

We'll now move on to the series of questions and answers, starting with Mr. Breton.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning.

I will ask my question in French. I don't know if you have.... If necessary, just put your headset on.

Ms. Jackson, I'll start with you. You caught my attention by talking about the program that the Royal Bank of Canada has had in place for many years. It's a way of encouraging emerging artists. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you and your organization.

Could you tell us a little bit about your program with emerging artists and your relationship with them? What has changed? What are the differences between past decades and today, for example, in terms of technology? Can you tell us more about this?

[Corrie Jackson]

About technology as it affects emerging artists tied to the program, there has definitely been an increase of communications around social media. There's an awareness of the different programs that go out and of the ability of artists to respond to that information. Outside of that, I think the changes are quite limited, from what my purview has been.

Working with the foundation, I'd say the ability for artists to be aware of calls for submissions and grant deadlines has increased. The visibility of those opportunities has increased.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Jackson.

Mr. Rollans, you said that you had some recommendations for the committee and that you would submit them in a brief. We also know that you made recommendations, last year if I'm not mistaken, to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. I don't know whether you presented them in person or in a brief.

Are you going to present the same recommendations in the brief you're going to submit to us? Could you tell us more about these recommendations?

[Glenn Rollans]

The short answer is yes. They're the same recommendations. I saved a little word length by not reading them out again today in committee.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

All right. Could you tell us about the recommendations you made to the industry committee?

[Glenn Rollans]

Yes, very quickly, we recommend that you clarify fair dealing for education, and that means essentially signalling to the education community that they need to license to take full advantage of the grey areas in the Copyright Act, rather than appropriating the right to copy. They need to promote a return to licensing through collective societies. Those licences cover all of the uses that would otherwise be unlicensed that occur through copying in digital or print form.

They need to increase statutory damages. At the moment, the maximum damages under the act are the same cost as would be there if an entity such as a university were to license, meaning that if you avoid licensing, the maximum cost you will have will be what you would have had otherwise. It's like being told that the cost of a parking ticket is the same cost as it would have been to park in the first place. No one would pay such a fee to park if they are only caught once in a while and have to pay only the cost of parking. There needs to be an incentive to license and a disincentive to infringe.

We recommend ensuring that Canada's international treaty obligations are met and that our law complies, especially with the three-step test, which is there in international standards. Essentially, the widespread uses should occur only in special cases, and those exceptions and limitations should only be in special cases. They shouldn't interfere with the ordinary exploitation of the work, and they shouldn't prejudice the author's interest, the copyright holder's interest. At the moment, our law does not meet that test.

Our fifth recommendation is to promote the effective operation of the Copyright Board. As I said, we were very disappointed yesterday, especially to see that statutory damages were not increased for our sector in the government's proposals.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Rollans.

I'll finish with you, Mr. Huffman. I understand that your cooperative, which seems unique, in a way promotes Inuit artists from Nunavut. Could you tell us how these artists are paid? I understand that the cooperative belongs to the Cape Dorset community. Do the artists do business with you? What is the link between the cooperative and the artists that allows them to be paid?

[William Huffman]

Thank you for your question.

It is a very complicated procedure, to tell you the truth, for a variety of reasons that I identified in my remarks. These are artists who deal almost entirely in a cash economy, so we have to be prepared to provide payment to artists in whatever form they're capable of accepting. And when we're dealing with Inuktitut speakers to begin with, the fact that we have a team of people who are fundamentally able to communicate with these artists....

Interestingly, a lot of our artists don't really understand the permissions and copyright program, so there is a very high level of trust between the artist stakeholders we work with and our organization. We've organized copyright arrangements with Centre Pompidou and with MoMA in New York. These are very important institutions. Most of our artists have no idea what these museums are. They've never been outside of the territory in some cases.

To answer your question, it is about our having that level of comfort, a level of trust, with our artists and being able to administer the program with their blessing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

We will now go to Mr. Shields, please.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you all for being here today.

Ms. Jackson, when you talked about what you do in your role, I found it very interesting. Maybe you can describe the process. How do you identify emerging artists?

[Corrie Jackson]

Absolutely, I'd be happy to.

Our curatorial department works with museums and galleries across Canada. I have a network of curators and experts who work across the country on exhibitions and programming. But our main point of contact in terms of acquisitions is with primary-market commercial galleries. They're galleries that represent living artists. They often have individuals in the studios who are seeing the work produced.

When there are exhibitions of those artists' works, we'll get an email or a PDF, or we'll go to see an exhibition in person. Usually we do research in advance as to the artist's past practice, as well as look into what upcoming exhibitions, publications, or milestones in their career they might be having. Then we make acquisitions based on that information.

When we're working with young artists, a big part of that is looking at what curators in the community are supporting their practice and spending time looking at their work and engaging. Definitely, artist-run centres are a huge step for those emerging artists, and we have a fair bit of awareness of those artist-run centres across the country and their programming.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

When you purchase this collection, how do you display it, and where?

[Corrie Jackson]

The collection goes into a lot of conference centres. It goes into client-facing offices and some senior executive offices, but mostly in spaces that are shared. We're looking to do more to also install the work in employee-facing areas.

We do a fair number of tours and talks for clients and employees, and that's how it gets engaged with primarily.

We just launched a website that shows 50 pieces from the collection. We've had to go through the process of making sure we have appropriate copyright, and then we give a breadth of understanding into the historical works in the collection, as well as the work by younger artists.

When we install the work, we do our best to make sure the works of young artists are hung alongside the work of the senior artists who have influenced them.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

That's of interest in the sense that if you walk into a business and there is a big painting on the wall, who knows how it got there and what it is?

Do you have an educational program for your staff to identify that this is what it's about?

[Corrie Jackson]

We do talks and tours. We also have an internal communication space that gives information about many of the pieces we acquire and what our mandate is. And if you were to walk into the offices, you'd also find a plaque with information about who the artist is, where they're from, when they were born, and details about the work itself.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Do you resell any of these that you acquire?

[Corrie Jackson]

I haven't in my time. We do donation of pieces to a major hospital network when the value of the work is below the cost to store and reframe it. But for the most part we do display it; 98% of the collection is on the walls. It's not stored. It really is out there in the world and looked at, which is exciting for us.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

You answered my last question.

Thank you.

Mr. Rollans, you talked about money. Do you know how much money Quebec has generated, because they are collecting it? Do you know the gross amount?