I would agree that the length of time the Copyright Board takes to make decisions has been problematic, and even more problematic is the the fact that payments are retroactive. The post-secondary sector has a tariff that extends back to 2011. When you talk about paying retroactive amounts, that's phenomenal. It's not only the uncertainty, but the amount of money that's sometimes involved in paying a retroactive tariff places an unnecessary burden on institutions.
In terms of the “mandatoriness” of the tariff—if that's a word, and I don't know if it is—I think we have a concern when it comes to Access Copyright and literary collectives generally, because they're not the exclusive rights holders. They own some rights, but there are also publishers and creators who own rights to content, and there are other people who licence the same content that Access Copyright does.
Making the tariff mandatory effectively takes the choice away from an educational institution like the University of Guelph in terms of where we want to purchase those rights from. If we want to be able to negotiate with someone and get more favourable rights than we can get under the tariff, it's a more responsible way for us to spend the public funds that we're given for that purpose if we can do that.
We would definitely be opposed to a tariff being mandatory.