Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm speaking today for the Association of Canadian Publishers, or ACP, where I serve as a voluntary board member.
Before I go on, I want to acknowledge on this National Indigenous Peoples Day that I'm very grateful to be joining you from Amiskwacîwâskahikan”, or Edmonton, which lies in Treaty No. 6 territory and is a traditional home and meeting ground of many indigenous peoples. I try to bring my gratitude for living and working here into my daily work as a book publisher.
I'm the owner of Brush Education and Freehand Books, both publishing companies based in Alberta. Brush Education specializes in higher education learning resources and Freehand is a literary press. I have worked as a writer, editor and publisher for more than 40 years.
ACP represents 115 independent English-language book publishing houses. Our members are Canadian owned and operate in communities across the country. Along with our francophone colleagues, we publish 80% of the new books published by Canadian writers each year. Our books cross all genres in both print and digital formats. That 80% of new books would otherwise go unpublished, silencing many marginalized voices.
Independent Canadian publishers work with teams of creators to create learning resources for Canadian students that reflect those students' lives. The faces in our resources look like the faces in their classrooms: diverse and inclusive. The values in our works are the values set out in their provinces' curricula. The languages are their languages and the spellings are their spellings. The history is their history. The places are their places. The stories are their stories.
That's what you lose when you allow widespread, unfair, uncompensated copying in the education sector.
I know today's session is intended to update this committee on the question of fair compensation in educational publishing. I was a witness here in October 2018, and I'm sorry to say I'm repeating myself today because so little has changed. We're just further down the same road we were on three years ago.
At my own company, Brush Education, licensing revenues from Access Copyright fell by roughly 80% from 2012 to 2020. This decline was mostly due to Canada's education sector outside of Quebec refusing to license with Access Copyright or to respect tariffs set by the Copyright Board of Canada. That loss of revenue represents a blow to my confidence when investing in new works; a blow to my capacity to employ writers, editors, illustrators and designers; a blow to my ability to serve instructors and students; and a blow to my opportunities to build and grow my companies.
In this environment, many of ACP's members have had to abandon or curtail their K-to-12 programs.
While we were losing direct revenue from copying, we also saw our markets for direct sales dwindle. Imagine being a cash-strapped student or instructor whose administrators tell you that you can now copy for free what you used to pay for. Not surprisingly, when you're in that situation, you stop paying publishers and creators for their new work and you become a scavenger of their old work.
I know the education sector still values our work enough to copy it; they just don't value it enough to pay us for it.
At many stages over the last decade, as the damage to my sector steadily accumulated in real time, we have been told to wait. Wait for new research. Wait for the courts. Wait for the parliamentary review of the act. You've heard or will hear that the right move now is to wait for the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the appeals of Access Copyright v. York University. I beg you to recognize that whatever the decision of the SCC, it will not fix the problem. It will kick us back into a cycle of litigation with our customers that creators and publishers hate and regret and will inevitably lose, because we have nowhere near the resources of the education sector to keep on fighting.
The good news is that this committee has already identified solutions in its “Shifting Paradigms” report of May 2019, in recommendations 18 through 21, as Ms. Levy specified.
On behalf of the Association of Canadian Publishers, my recommendations today are your recommendations: to repair the act so that it no longer serves as a blanket excuse for uncompensated copying.
Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and members of the committee, I thank you for your good work and for the opportunity to talk with you today.