Thank you for this opportunity to speak.
I'm a writer. I've published a poetry collection, three middle grade novels, and two young adult novels, all of them set in Atlantic Canada. These books have been nominated for many awards and have won four collectively.
From 2009 to 2015, from Vancouver Island to St. John's, I visited schools, libraries, conferences, and book festivals. In Newfoundland, I went to two schools that had never had a real writer in their classroom. In Ontario I attended several of the Ontario Library Association's Harbourfront gatherings, with 3,000 children bused in daily, many of whom had read and voted on my book.
My first children's book sold 11,000 copies. As a writer, in other words, I was instrumental in putting Canadian content in the classroom, and I felt honoured to do so.
The average income for a Canadian writer is $13,000 a year, which is about half the average minimum wage. We don't get EI, paid vacations, sick leave, or a salary. Access Copyright used to be a reliable source of income. This is no longer true. My 2017 payback cheque was one-quarter the amount of my 2012 payback cheque, a sizable decrease. The reason, as I understand it, is that since 2012 the education sector, including universities and schools, has permitted free copying, ignoring licensing agreements that ensured fair compensation to Canadian writers and publishers.
Despite the recent federal ruling against York University, ministries of education and school boards across the country have now launched a lawsuit against Access Copyright. One of my young adult novels in 2016 was picked up by the Nova Scotia education department for the school curriculum. However, members of the same government, by participating in this lawsuit, in my opinion, are acting punitively toward the province's creators, regardless of the fact that writers and publishers have earned less in the past few years and will earn less in the future, should the lawsuit win.
Thank you.