Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Our subject today is not the physical health but the cultural health of our great country. I think we've got the solution to better jobs. Reading books, we know, leads to better jobs, higher income, and a more productive economy. So while the pills are being taken, we also suggest at least one book a month to keep our cultural life active.
We would like to thank the Government of Canada and the Minister of Finance for their continuing support of our industry--these programs were begun and rationalized under the Mulroney government of the 1980s, and there have been excellent results in terms of both the cultural output and the financial output of our industry. We have created 6,000 highly skilled jobs directly in the industry, not to speak of the great uptick in knowledge and capacity that readers of our books have experienced.
We supply direct employment to 16,000 writers in the country. There are writers and publishers in every province and in most communities. The publishing industry is the most cost-effective and competitive of all the cultural industries. As a bonus, in addition to all of this, it's an industry that pays for itself. The taxes collected from the publishing industry and the spinoff activities from the cultural industries in terms of the freelancers we use, the printers we employ, the designers, the typesetters--all of this creates a ripple effect that we calculate leads to over $1 billion across Canada in employment and in economic activity.
So we come before the committee, not asking for more support, but we are asking for the program that's in place and has been in place for several decades to be continued. We're facing a number of challenges, but the main issue for us now that the dollar is so robust is that we can't outsource Canadian culture. We have to buy Canadian culture with the big Canadian loonie right here in Canada, and if we're unable to do that--and we do that with some modest support from the Government of Canada--all the books Canadians read will be determined by choices made by editors in New York, or Frankfurt, or London, or Paris. What we're asking for is continuation of programs that leave Canadian publishers, the Canadian-owned sector of the market, with a level playing field.
We are an association of entrepreneurs. We're independent. We tend to be small and medium-sized businesses. We want to publish, as we do now, 85% of Canadian authors, but we would like to do it in a very fair way.
That's enough for me. Thanks.