Absolutely.
I won't make this a history lesson, but our sector has evolved very much as a result of moving from a business that was largely based on importing foreign product—American largely, but also British—to today, when not only are we leading in terms of providing the Canadian marketplace with educational resources but we're recognized globally, especially for our creative artists and creative writers, for their work right across the globe. That transition has been a result of our building a sector that tells Canadian stories by Canadian authors with Canadian voices, and it's been just as important in education as it has been with trade publishers, such as Simon & Schuster.
The best example I could probably give is Oxford University Press. When they decided to exit the K-to-12 publishing sector because of concerns over the interpretations of fair dealing, they had a Canadian history manuscript on the books. They shopped it around to the rest of the sector to see if anyone wanted to take that manuscript off their hands for publication, and nobody touched it.
There's a very real example of a Canadian history textbook that died on the vine because of a major leading global publisher having concerns about the integrity of the Canadian marketplace, and voila, we don't have another Canadian history textbook to replace it. That example can roll through almost every discipline you can think of.
Then you think about STEM—science, math, etc.—and how critical it is that our students be competitive in those fields. Our business, again, has been built on creating Canadian examples and Canadian relevance for K-to-12 classrooms, and that's seriously at risk. When something as small as 30 million bucks is taken out of the system.... It's not a highly lucrative, highly profitable business to start with.
Education is different in British Columbia from what it is in Newfoundland. I can build a beautiful textbook for Ontario; I can't sell it in Manitoba. I have to build a whole new one. It's very inefficient to start with; therefore, it's not a highly lucrative, high-margin business. Then when you slap fair dealing interpretations on top of it, it's no wonder firms make the decision to exit. That hurts everybody, but most of all it hurts students.