I certainly could comment. Thank you for the question.
As a preamble, you mentioned that a lot of the crisis in our industry was caused by the run-up in the Canadian dollar, and that's true; however, it would not be such a crisis if we had a Canadian industry, so let me put that as the foundation: the reason I come to Ottawa, for every single committee and every single appearance in front of the CRTC, is to build the Canadian industry. We would not be in such a jeopardized situation if we had a Canadian industry.
Yes, illegal recording is increasingly a problem. We were very encouraged last winter, I believe it was, when former Minister of Industry Bernier and Minister of Canadian Heritage Bev Oda announced new legislation in the Criminal Code for illegal copying, camcording, and distribution of motion pictures. There is a definite effect to distributors of these films, certainly, and a loss of earnings to distributors, but when recordings can be illegally made, there is obviously no remuneration downstream in the royalty structure for any of the creators, the writers, the directors, or the actors. That is a tremendous loss of revenue through the royalty structures we have in place as a union, so ACTRA has been very much in favour of that legislation.
We actually work very closely with the motion picture distributors in Canada, and the Honourable Doug Frith, a former minister, is a good colleague of ours on this battle. There's certainly an impact there in earnings, and it's tremendous. The writers are on strike in the United States right now over the earning of potentially billions of dollars for new media production, for which they currently receive nothing. That's just an example of how stopping the flow of earnings through any kind of royalty structure has a tremendous downstream effect, so performers are affected.