Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you.
Access Copyright is a not-for-profit copyright collective created in 1988 by Canadian creators and publishers to manage the reuse of their works by educational institutions, businesses and not-for-profits. Collective licensing facilitates access to works while ensuring that creators and publishers are fairly compensated when their works are used. This empowers Canadian creators to document our stories and weave together the fabric of the Canadian experience. These stories tell us who we are, where we come from and where we are going.
I'm here today because the education sector outside of Quebec went back on their promise to creators and publishers and to the legislative committee that was examining amendments to the Copyright Act.
Representatives of the education sector repeatedly reassured the legislative committee that fair dealing for education would not impact collective licensing or the livelihood of creators and publishers, yet when the 2012 Copyright Act went into effect, Canadian educational institutions outside of Quebec, in unison, abandoned collective licensing, thereby causing significant harms to writers, visual artists and publishers. They adopted copying guidelines under the guise of fair dealing, authorizing themselves to copy for free what they used to pay for under our collective licence.
Post-secondary institutions could have all of their copying needs met under a collective licence by paying $14.31 a year per student, the cost of a paperback book, and for a K-12 school, it was a mere $2.41 per student per year, and yet the educational sector has spent the past 10 years depriving Canadian authors and publishers of their rightful compensation.
Six hundred million pages of published works are being copied annually with no compensation to the authors. Copying is not licensed through academic libraries or made available under open access licences. These 600 million copies are not licensed. This copying was found by the courts and this committee to harm the livelihood of creators and publishers. It substitutes for the purchase of books and it has resulted in a 76% decrease in royalties to creators and publishers. Historically, these royalties have represented 20% of creators' working incomes and 16% of publishers' profits.
Think of Coteau Books in Regina, which closed its doors after 40 years in business. The global pandemic was the final blow. Now, with one less regional publisher, fewer authors from Saskatchewan, including indigenous writers, will be able to tell their stories.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Oxford University Press, Emond Montgomery and McGraw Hill all exited the K-12 market.
On average, the annual net income a Canadian writer earns from writing is $9,380. Imagine being a writer during a global pandemic. Overnight, your revenue streams from book tours, festivals and school visits disappear. A royalty cheque for educational copying, which 10 years ago you could have counted on, would have been a welcome reprieve.
The marketplace for the educational use of Canadian content is broken and needs to be fixed. I'm here today to remind you that the solution and the clear path to implementing it exist. Because of the work of this committee, led by Madam Dabrusin during the statutory review of the Copyright Act, you have recommendations in the “Shifting Paradigms” report that will restore the marketplace—specifically, recommendations 18 to 21.
This is a solution that all opposition parties support.
I thank both committee vice-chairs, Mr. Rayes and Mr. Champoux, as well as Mr. Boulerice, the NDP critic for Canadian heritage, for writing to Minister Guilbeault to urge the immediate implementation of these recommendations.
You also have an imminent opportunity to make it happen.
CUSMA requires the government to make amendments to the Copyright Act before the end of 2022. We urge this committee to work with the government to address recommendations 18 to 21 as part of that bill.
Unless we want a Canadian society in which creativity is seen as a luxury, in which being a creator or publisher is not a way of life but just a hobby, in which students will have less access to Canadian stories and will know more about the American constitution than about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this is the moment to get the job done.
Thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer questions.