Thanks. Good morning. Bonjour.
Thank you for inviting me to this committee.
My name is Monia Mazigh. In a previous life I was a finance professor; today I am a Canadian author. I published my first book in 2008, and I have since published two novels. I write in French, and I consider myself one of the lucky Canadian authors to be published in both French and English. My English publisher is House of Anansi, and I am very grateful to be published by this talented and dedicated Canadian house. Their trust in me and their strong support have been crucial in building and developing my writing career.
Today I am a full-time writer. I write columns, blogs and books. I have been invited to several salons du livre across Quebec and to many literary festivals, as well as to other book events across Canada. I also participated in salons du livre in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Paris, France. Last summer I spent three months at the Historic Joy Kogawa House as a writer in residence to work on my third novel.
When I started my writing career, I kept a day job, mainly part time, so I could write while benefiting from the financial security and receiving a paycheque at the end of the month. However, three years ago I took the radical decision to dedicate all my effort to writing. That came with a cost: the loss of my income. Added to this, with the drop of the royalties, even what used to be a cheque for a couple of hundred dollars is now almost non-existent.
I don't have the absolute certainty to link the drop of my income to the changes in the 2012 Copyright Act and the widespread adoption of the self-declared fair dealing guidelines; nevertheless, I personally think it is very likely related to it.
Today, if it was not for the grant that I receive from the Council for the Arts, which my author friend refers to as social welfare for the writers, and the cheque from the public lending right program, my income from writing would be a white noise like what we used to describe in finance models: all the factors that cannot be predicted, and mostly negligible.
I came to writing with a tremendous passion for education. I still believe that books, poems and novels are tools that can help students to complete their education and improve it. When I wrote my first novel, Mirrors and Mirages, about Muslim women in Canada, it had a huge educational component. I corresponded with grade 12 students from a French immersion high school in Vancouver who had been assigned to read my novel and write their French final assignment about it. What a great achievement it is for an author to be read, discussed and reflected on by students. It would be even better if, at the end of the year, that achievement were reflected in some additional royalties paid by the educational institutions to my publisher and thus to me.
Unfortunately, with these changes in laws, those royalties are being denied to us. Our creative work is being used for free. In the meantime, Canadian authors are seeing holes in their incomes getting bigger and bigger. This should be reversed.
Canadian writers are ambassadors around the world. In 2017, I joined a delegation of Canadian authors to visit Senegal in West Africa. We went to schools to speak to youth. We had round tables with Senegalese authors. We told them about our creative work, and through it they imagine our country, our people and the colour of our sky, but how can we keep our creative work going if, in counterpart, we don't receive our financial due through royalties?
History is filled with famous classic authors who died in poverty, despised and abandoned by their societies, but later recognized and adulated for their genius, creativity and artistic merit. Why do we want to perpetuate these human tragedies?
Creativity is an added value for a country. It is part of our common wealth. It should be cherished, shared and recognized. The Government of Canada should protect the users as well as the creators of such creativity.
I strongly support a re-examination of the 2012 Copyright Act so that authors can earn back royalties from their books being used by Canadian educational institutions.
Thank you.