I don't have a strong view that crown copyright should be eliminated. I have not investigated it that much myself, but I have had conversations with other law librarians who are a lot more familiar with crown copyright than I am, and they assert that there is good reason for maintaining crown copyright over certain subjects. However, I do think crown copyright over primary law, and particularly case law, is not helpful in furthering the work we can do in Canada.
One example is CanLII, the legal information provider. It is able to make case law and legislation available to all Canadians for free, but it has to rely on agreements with courts. I can't supply it with all my books and say to go ahead and digitize them and take out the proprietary content from the publisher, because that's not seen as permissible right now.
There's so much more we can do. I think it's really in the interest of the country as a whole to see that part of crown copyright no longer included. It enables us to keep that information public and open, as opposed to it being controlled by publishers that may have deep pockets and large international connections, and to have the ability to go further with digital content to create more resources and tools. We don't want to tie ourselves to the for-profit international industry, when we could have the ability to create wonderful things locally in Canada with open access to the raw data that forms public law.