Thank you very much to all our presenters. Of course, I would also reiterate what I reiterated the last time, to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the first nation people of this area, and also of the Métis.
This subject is very important to us as we are trying to review the copyright law. It has been said many times that it's not adequate to cover indigenous peoples' art, their culture, it's extremely important.
I'm not indigenous. My wife and children are Métis. Sault Ste. Marie, where I'm from, is a traditional area. People used to come from all over the Midwest and the Prairies to meet along St. Marys River because of the whitefish. It became an area to which everyone was coming to fish, to bring back to their communities as far away as here in Manitoba sometimes. It started to happen around that area, thousands and thousands of years before the Europeans came. There were, naturally, powwows in different forms. There would be culture, song, dance and, of course, the elders telling their stories. It became a really interesting area. Sault Ste. Marie and that area had a dark history as well. It was also home to a residential school. As part of the settlement, the survivors came together and there was a commitment to create an Anishinaabek discovery centre, which the government has funded and is well under way. That's going to house a chiefs' library and some very interesting things.
Your testimony is very important, because what we're trying to understand is that the copyright law has fundamental principles under British and European law, and that doesn't necessarily work for first nations. I think some of you have mentioned it. The first one is that a lot of times, copyright is attached to an individual, and on the indigenous side, it's the community, it's the people, that it's attached to.
If I get very specific about the Copyright Act, it affords exclusive rights to one or more specific persons over an original work, fixed in some way. These rights are affordable largely for commercial purposes. The rights holder can transfer these rights to another individual or entity, and the rights themselves are temporary. Once they expire, the work is freely available to the public. To what extent do these principles conflict with the ways in which indigenous communities understand their cultures and traditional knowledge?
I'll start with perhaps Dr. Lavallee.