Thank you so much.
My name is Carellin Brooks. I am a writer and a member of the Writers' Union of Canada. I was on the board of the Vancouver Public Library for eight years.
I knew that I wanted to be a writer from the time that I was a very small child. I wanted to contribute to Canadian stories, I guess. I didn't quite think of it that way when I was six years old, but I wanted to do that. When I became an instructor, I also wanted to represent the work of my fellow writers in the classroom. I take pride in introducing students and readers to Canadian writing.
When the 2012 Copyright Act was under consultation, I and other people came and talked to MPs about it. It seems that none of what we said at that time went into the actual act. Before the Copyright Act, we had Access Copyright payments that came to us every year. As other speakers have said, those payments have dropped by half or more. I think one of the other speakers said that 83% of Canadian writers make under $15,000 a year from their writing. I'm definitely in that category. I just cashed my most recent royalty cheque for my most recent book—this is the book—and it was $48. The book was also translated into French.
I've worked at universities, including the University of British Columbia and Kwantlen currently. Both of them opted out of paying their Access Copyright fees since the modernization of the Copyright Act in 2012. This puts me in a difficult position as an instructor and as a writer. From surveys that the Writers' Union runs nationally, I know that copyright is one of the top hot-button issues among my writer peers. I feel that if I am providing Canadian content in the classroom in the form of photocopies, I am undercutting them and undermining them. I can't, in good conscience, hand out photocopies of works that I want my students to see. I have to do a weird little workaround where I display it on the board but don't give everyone a copy.
One time, I knew in advance that I was going to teach a course. I contacted some writers I knew and asked them individually for permission to use their work. They said yes. They did not charge me anything for this. However, this isn't really a viable solution for me. University instruction is in some cases itself a bit precarious. Sometimes, depending on where you are on the list, you don't know if you're going to be teaching until a few weeks or even a few days before your courses start. Even if you had the will, then, you just wouldn't have the time to go and individually ask each author if you could use that person's work.
When students tell me that they are going to copy a chapter, I have to put my fingers in my ears and make that little singing “la-la-la” noise, because I don't want to hear it and I don't want to lecture them. I often feel like I am the only person in the setting who cares about this stuff. I talk to my peers, other instructors, and they don't have any consciousness of why it would be an issue to photocopy large amounts of book chapters, articles, and so on and so forth. There is no issue for them in terms of the ethics of that.
The Copyright Act of 2012 has had huge impacts. It has had a huge negative impact on me and on the other writers I know. It has also had a huge impact on our families. I am the sole breadwinner in my household, and there was a time when I would use my Access Copyright cheque to pay for my Christmas. Access Copyright doesn't do that anymore. So I would love to see some changes to the Copyright Act.
Thank you very much.