Thank you.
My name is Chris Tabor and I'm the director of the bookstore at Queen's University at Kingston. I'm here today on behalf of Campus Stores Canada, the national trade association of institutionally owned and operated campus stores.
We have almost 100 member stores nationwide and more than 80 vendors and supplier associates. In short, if you know one, or more than one, of the million university or college students in Canada, there's a very good chance you know someone served by Campus Stores Canada.
It's no secret that attending a post-secondary institution is an expensive proposition. Costs for tuition, room and board, and materials are ever increasing, while a student's opportunities to work are extremely limited. There are always new costs on the horizon, such as the prohibitively high proposed new access copyright fee, which will see students shell out millions more to pay for service they already get.
It is important, then, to examine policies and regulations that artificially increase the cost of education, with the aim to reduce fees wherever possible. One such economic impediment is the artificial inflation of book prices because of provisions found in the Copyright Act.
It may interest the committee to know that in the years 2008-09 the U.S. federal government and approximately 23 states considered legislation affecting access to and the affordability of course materials for U.S. students. I am very happy to be here to talk about how with the stroke of a pen a change in a regulation can save Canadian students tens of millions of dollars each year without any cost to the public purse.
The Copyright Act allows publishers to establish import monopolies on books from authors around the world, and in turn it outlines what these import monopolies may charge for the cost of books. Books imported by those other than these exclusive importers are referred to as parallel imports.
Subsection 27(1) of the Copyright Act makes parallel importation of new books an offence, provided that those exclusive distributors adhere to the regulations promulgated under the act. Specifically, book importation regulations stipulate that an importer can charge a bookseller the price of a book in the country of origin, plus the difference in the exchange rate between the two countries, plus an additional 10% or 15%, depending on the country of origin.
Campus Stores Canada considers this to be a private tariff established by public policy. It is a tax paid from the wallets of Canadian students and their families, and it is collected primarily by foreign private interests. It allows publishers/distributors to receive an additional 10% or 15% of pure profit from their products before risking losing a sale to parallel importers. Importantly, this returns no appreciable benefit to the artists or the authors who created the works in question.
These unnecessary costs are not insignificant. The trade in imported books by campus booksellers is worth $262 million annually, representing roughly half of the books sold at these stores. Removing this tariff would save students about $30 million annually, with savings beginning virtually overnight.
The tariff's design is an artifact of publishing, commercial distribution, and policy paradigms that have changed radically since these regulations were promulgated in 1999, most notably through the development of Internet-based commerce.
Unlike booksellers, individual consumers are not bound by these regulations, and they are able to freely and legally purchase books from the lowest-cost provider regardless of geography--and they do. Through Internet retailers, Canadian consumers are often able to buy books more cheaply than Canadian resellers can. It confounds market logic that a Canadian student is able to import individual books more economically than a multinational corporation importing commercial volumes of products. This is a direct result of the tariff's artificial inflation on domestic book prices.
To get the best value on learning materials, students are effectively forced by this tariff to turn to Internet retailers in other countries, an extra step that is as absurd as it is inconvenient.
In previous budgets, the government has introduced measures to reduce the cost of post-secondary learning materials, including a $500 tax credit for the purchase of textbooks. We applaud these efforts. However, moving forward, we believe that a substantially greater reduction in textbook prices can be achieved by amending the book importation regulations to remove the 10% and 15% tariffs. Doing so will see students spend millions of dollars less for textbooks each year, without the need for any expenditure on the part of the government.
While such changes are not included in the current copyright bill before the House of Commons, legislative changes are not needed to remove this tariff. Regulations, as you know, can be altered with the stroke of a pen. In an era where fiscal prudence is king, government must be sure to take advantage of opportunities to decrease cost to Canadians without increasing cost to government. This is one of those areas.
I'd like to thank you for your time, and of course I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.