Thank you very much, Chair.
Good morning. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to appear today.
I'm speaking to you today from Tkaronto, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, which is bound by Dish With One Spoon, a treaty between the Anishinabe and the Haudenosaunee to share the territory, promote peace and protect the land. I'm very, very grateful to have a home here.
I work for The Writers' Union of Canada. I'm here representing over 2,300 authors working in every province and territory in Canada. I am also chair of the International Authors Forum, headquartered in the U.K., and there I work for over 700,000 creative professionals around the globe. These are my day jobs, but if I didn't work for The Writers' Union, I would be a member of the union, because I'm a published author myself. Nothing I say here today is an abstract or theoretical concept for me. I feel the struggles of Canada's authors like Sylvia in my own experience.
On this issue, I've come to Ottawa many times. I've sat down with staff at the Prime Minister's Office, met with senators, ministers, parliamentary secretaries and members of Parliament—many of you, in fact—and as Glenn mentioned, I've testified before this committee and have written submissions to many copyright consultations. This issue is so prominent on my desk, and has been for the last decade, that I have a fairly standard script, the themes of which are fairness, damage to creative incomes, painful delay and simple solutions.
I hope we touch on all those themes during our discussion today, but for this initial presentation, I want to talk instead about something else. I want to talk about respect.
My son just completed his first year at a Canadian university. It was obviously less than ideal. He did the whole year's worth of work from his bedroom over Zoom. He will likely start his second year the same way. If my son were here, he would tell you that is a profoundly disorienting way to go through what is one of the most important times of your life. The university, understandably, shut down all in-person student services. There were no clubs, no meeting his classmates and no chance to work for the campus radio station or newspaper—at least, not in any real way, the way that I did when I was his age. My son still doesn't even have a university library card.
There's no question that the educational product delivered to my son last year was not the product advertised, and yet we did not begrudge the university its tuition or its student fees, and we would have happily paid the $14.31 copy licensing fee as well.
Why? It's because we respect the value of education, and we think that when a service comes with a price, you pay it or you don't expect the service. Canada's authors are among the most highly educated professionals in our society. Over half the union's members have more than one degree, which means that collectively they've paid enormous amounts into the education system, out of respect. We're simply asking for the same respect in return. Because we do this for a living and because copyright is the foundation of that living, our published work comes with a price, and we expect to be fairly paid.
In all those Ottawa meetings I mentioned, I talked a lot about the economic impact of the last decade. There has certainly been a lot of earned income lost by Canada's authors because the education system decided not to pay its bills. A lot of creative careers were stunted, damaged or even ended because of the cynical destruction of that market. In a way, the damage is unmeasurable, because how do you count the number of books an author didn't write after giving up? How do you count the number of foreign rights sales from those unwritten books or the number of television or film adaptations that never happened because the author just couldn't keep going, even as their work was being taught in the nation's schools?
I talk a lot about lost income and lost creativity. Those are two hugely important losses, yet when I hear from members of the union, the thing they almost always mention first is how disrespected they feel by this situation, disrespected by an educational system they want to think of as a partner.
The current chair of the union, Rhea Tregebov, just retired from teaching at a Canadian creative writing MFA program, and she talks about how she had to go around her university's official policy to make sure no unlicensed copies of writers' works were used, out of respect for her other colleagues—the authors.
We are asking for respect right now, from the education system and from Parliament, because when we go to the Copyright Board to defend our rights, we win. We go to Federal Court to defend our rights and we win. We testify at copyright reviews and our solutions are recommended to Parliament. All of this defence of our rights costs enormous amounts of time and money—time and money that individual authors simply don’t have—and yet we're still waiting for this problem to be fixed.
Please fix it. Implement the “Shifting Paradigms” report recommendations that have been mentioned several times. Let's do that as soon as possible, when the act is amended for CUSMA.
Thank you. I'd be happy to take questions.