Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for having us, Madam Chair.
The Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization represents more than 85 art museum directors who lead a diversity of visual arts institutions across Canada, from sea to sea to sea. It is a lean organization, with a volunteer board and one employee, our executive director, Moira McCaffrey, who is with me today.
Our mission statement asserts that “CAMDO-ODMAC strengthens the ability of Canadian art museum and public art gallery directors to champion art and its significance in society”. It is in this spirit that we address the committee today.
Artists are the foundation of the visual arts ecosystem. Without their creative work, we would have nothing to present to the public. Other organizations, such as Canadian Artists' Representation, have documented the unsatisfactory economic conditions under which many Canadian artists work. It benefits diverse Canadian publics and all those working to bring visual art to them if artists can work in conditions of economic security.
CAMDO-ODMAC was a key initiator of the visual arts summit in 2007. It sought to bring the visual arts sector together to advocate for common interests. Our membership in the Visual Arts Alliance reflects that commitment. We support the alliance's call for a solution that embeds copyright reform within a “holistic set of measures...brought to bear...to...address the ongoing systemic socio-economic precarity of this country's independent and professional artists.”
We are encouraged that this committee is working in tandem with the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, and is focused, not solely on the Copyright Act, but on the larger question of artists' remuneration.
Many in the visual arts sector struggle to secure the resources needed to provide cultural value to Canadian communities. Art museums must protect their financial and administrative sustainability in order to deliver on their core mandates. We may easily find ourselves in a defensive position, holding on to a small wedge of a pie that, depending on local circumstances, has often not kept pace with the growth of either visual arts production and presentation in Canada or the demonstrated desire of Canadians to experience visual art.
Visual artists rarely earn a living from their artistic practice. It is generally only through other employment, such as teaching, that they enjoy job security, benefits and pensions. Revenue Canada tends to treat them as independent business people. That model is seriously flawed. Artists produce objects and experiences of intangible cultural value for the public good, a value only imperfectly reflected in the price their works command on the open market.
Artists are professional collaborators with museums in presenting their art to various publics. They have a right to fair compensation for the value they provide, through the purchase of art for public collections, and through fees paid for temporary exhibitions, performances, residencies, workshops and presentations.
Our members are guided by a recommended fee schedule agreed upon between CAMDO-ODMAC, the Canadian Museums Association, Canadian Artists' Representation and the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec.
However, compensation models that seem to work well for one group may have unforeseen and unintended consequences for another. For example, the recommendation to delete the phrase “created after June 7, 1988” from part I, 3(1) of the Copyright Act would, if implemented, have varying consequences for our members' institutions.
For some, the effects might be negligible. For museums that focus entirely on temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, distinguishing between works in an exhibition on the basis of the date of creation may seem arbitrary. Some may prefer to pay all artists on an equal basis, regardless of the date of creation of their works.
On the other hand, for museums with major historical collections, particularly of mid-20th century and modern art that remains under copyright protection, removing this distinction could have profound consequences, not only in the cost of exhibition fees themselves but also in the administrative burden of tracking down artists and estates to pay those fees. Such administrative costs can easily exceed the amount paid to artists themselves. Increasing such costs might prevent some museums from exhibiting works from their own collections and force others to reduce exhibition programming and invest more in administration, both of which defeat the purpose of getting money into the hands of artists.
Shifting financial burdens between artists and museums may be robbing Peter to pay Paul, when both Peter and Paul require appropriate support to provide that public good.
One copyright mechanism currently in effect in Canada may provide a model for effective deployment of public funds to improve the compensation of creators. Public lending right compensates authors, translators, illustrators, photographers and editors for public access to their work in Canadian libraries.
Under this system, libraries, beyond the purchase cost of a book, do not have to pay creators, nor to track them down to negotiate contracts for the use of their work. The PLR commission samples cataloguing data in selected libraries across Canada, and calculates payments to published creators registered with the program, based on the estimated circulation of their works. Canada was the 13th country to establish such a program in 1986, with an initial budget of $3 million. By 2017, there were 33 countries with comparable systems.
The virtues of the PLR system are: one, it does not impose a financial or heavy administrative burden on institutions within which Canadians access copyright material; two, it minimizes transactional costs by centralizing administration in one commission with which creators simply register, rather than them having to negotiate individual copyright licences; and three, it maximizes the extent to which program costs translate directly into payments to creators.
PLR is a relatively frictionless model. Its characteristics could well be emulated in the administration of other copyright licences. Recommendations for copyright reform need to be considered in the context of other legislation and policies, and the mechanisms used to realize them. Public institutions must have the resources to cover increased costs. Regimes to manage copyright must minimize paperwork and administrative burden, simplify processes, and maximize the delivery of resources to their intended beneficiaries.
We recommend that the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage advise the House to take an integrated approach that balances institutional sustainability with economic security for artists, and that deploys copyright law, taxation policy and funding in a holistic manner; and that the committee consider public lending right as a possible model for management of some payments for uses of artists' copyright.
We echo Visual Arts Alliance's recommendations that the committee work with the Canada Revenue Agency to ensure that the Income Tax Act be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the realities of self-employed artists. It also recommends that the committee equip itself with the appropriate tools to measure and monitor the socioeconomic conditions of working artists.
Those tools should measure and monitor the operational conditions of Canadian museums, so that solutions are institutionally sustainable, and win the support of museum professionals in solidarity with Canadian artists. Further, the committee give artist's resale rights serious consideration, with attention to minimizing any administrative burden it may impose on institutions.
We are willing partners in any conversations or research towards the design of successful models for a renewed copyright regime. A successful reform, we believe, will be an integrated model deploying copyright law, taxation policy and funding, that is financially and administratively sustainable for all parties concerned.
Thank you.
