Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to talk about the whole issue of textbooks, Madam Sokoloski. It is clear that there has been a precipitous drop-off in educational publishing revenues, both from the evidence I've read in witness testimony heard by this committee and from research our analysts have done. It's pretty shocking how much the educational publishing sector has been affected by the 2012 copyright law. You mentioned 600 million pages being copied without remuneration for authors. There has been the court decision with York University that still has to be put into effect. You combine all those things and it paints a clear picture that the 2012 changes that included education under fair dealing have had a profound impact on the industry.
Your recommendations and those of other witnesses are clear: Remove education from the fair-dealing provisions in the law.
I want to dig a little deeper into what's going on. I was shocked to find out that our local school board no longer purchases textbooks for high schools. I was completely floored. I don't know how you go through high school without a textbook. I have three young children in school. In primary school they received handouts, and they end up at home at the bottom of their backpacks combined with the dribbles of drink boxes, running shoes, sweaty gym clothes and all that stuff. Trying to make sense of it all sometimes is frustrating.
I went through school with textbooks and those were the core of how I learned, so I was astounded—apparently it's not restricted to our local school board. It's many school boards across the province that no longer purchase textbooks. Then I come to this committee and find out about including education under fair dealing and about the precipitous decline. I have been thinking about this for a number of weeks.
Are the secondary and post-secondary sectors not purchasing textbooks because of the costs, or is this a new fad they are embarking on? Obviously the loophole or the change to the 2012 law allowed them—and their interpretation thereof allowed them—to not purchase as many textbooks as they did prior to the 2012 change. Setting aside that change in law, what is driving this precipitous decline in the purchasing of textbooks in high schools and universities? Is it to reduce costs for students and the system, or is it because of a fad that we don't need textbooks and we'll just assembly multimedia online materials and that's how we'll educate students?