Mr. Chair, I'm thankful to the committee for inviting us to express our opinion on this subject of the entertainment software industry and video games.
I'm the chairman and CEO of the Canadian Interactive Alliance, which is a trans-Canada association for all the interactive media associations in nine provinces. I'm also a co-founder of my own video game studio.
In the presentation we have distributed to you, we have provided some data about the Canadian interactive industry profile that was published early in December. I'm not going to go through each of these statistics, but I find it very important to share these numbers, and you can see all the details of our study on our website at ciaic.ca. All of the slides until page 12 are the broad data for and the definition of our industry, which I will not go into detail about.
The video game industry represents a big chunk of our members across Canada. Our member, Deirdre Ayre, representing Newfoundland, will introduce herself and cover some of the issues you'll find starting at slide 13.
Go ahead, Deirdre.