Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My apologies for the kerfuffle at the beginning of the meeting. It was not very acceptable, in my opinion.
There really is a major crisis; it is societal and probably all over the western world. The systems in place worked very well and worked together very well. Now, people are coming in from outside and we do not know what to do about it. Heck, we haven’t even made them pay any sales tax on their services. We are really caught with our pants down. They come in and we just jump up and down, at the same time as they are eating up your business and our distinct cultural identity.
We may have our issues. We may feel that Le Devoir is not covering the NDP enough, or anything else you like, but that is not the point. We want to be happy that you can still be covering us in five years, for better or for worse. That goes for everyone. There may be complaints about regional weeklies. We may find all kinds of administrative issues, but the main issue is much broader, and I am glad that the committee is taking time to examine it.
Are you able to provide us with the wording of the section? I am pretty familiar with copyright as an issue. What is the wording of the section that allows Google to pirate your content, to take it apart and to redistribute it everywhere without compensating you at all? If you don’t have it, could you send it to us? We do not have a ton of researchers here. It would help me a lot.