Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to begin with a comment. It will be very important to find out whether Mr. Blaney's colleagues on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, Mr. Yurdiga and Mr. Shields, share his view on fair dealing. We'll have to see.
To the Canadian copyright organization, Mr. Harnum, I did some research. I want to know if your crystal ball in 2018 is as good as it was in 2009. I'm reading from the report that your organization submitted to similar committees in advance of the 2012 review. I think you telegraphed what you meant by the fact that the document was called, basically, fair dealing's not a good idea.
Here's what you said:
“Fair use” has been described as an “astonishingly bad” system amounting to little more than “the right to hire a lawyer.”
Then it goes on to talk about the United Kingdom, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand rejecting those methods, and how there were lots of ways in Canadian law to protect authors but also let people have access to that material.
Here's what is really interesting for me, from what you said then:
Far from solving copyright problems, adopting fair use would only exacerbate them. Its drawbacks are numerous. Fair use would lead to uncertainty, expensive litigation and leave important public policy decisions to be made by courts instead of Parliament. It would reduce revenues available to the Canadian creative industries; revenues which are vital to their indigenous growth. It would undermine legitimate licensing models including collective licensing of copyrights.
It's a very prescient report from 2009.
We know that there are still good news stories. We know that Canadian creators are exporting content. There's the Frankfurt book fair. We know that Canadian stories are being turned into movies, and people get paid for that.
We hear clearly that the education sector's a mess. We talked about the $26 tariff for universities earlier today. In K-to-12 it's $2.41 that the school boards aren't prepared to pay to make sure that authors get their fair share. That's not even a couple of chocolate bars in this country, and it's certainly less than a latte for the teacher, so I don't get it.
What we have now is a regime in which we have the stick, which is the tariff. How do we get back to a carrot so that everybody can just play in this field together, we can have our good stories, you guys can get paid, and the educators can educate? Are there any carrots left, or are we now in a framework where it's only the stick?
Then I'm going to go to your colleagues here around the table, beginning with Mr. Harnum.