Thank you for having me here today to speak as a witness to the Standing Committee on International Trade.
My name is Meghan Sali. I'm a digital rights specialist with OpenMedia. Founded in 2008, OpenMedia is a community-based civic engagement organization working to safeguard the open Internet and bringing citizens' and innovators' voices into Internet policy-making processes.
My hope is that through these public hearings the committee will finally begin to understand the depth of the Canadian public's concern about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the scope of citizens' disillusionment. We have a right to participate in the decisions that affect our daily lives and yet have been entirely excluded from these negotiations.
Over the past four years, OpenMedia has engaged more than 130,000 Canadians, who have shared their concerns with us on the intellectual property chapter and its serious implications for digital commerce, free expression online, and access to knowledge.
I'd like to note that our work to educate Canadians about the TPP was no easy task, as the details of this agreement were kept secret until the full text was published less than six months ago. Our only means of information was reading the tea leaves of leaked documents and mining information from inside sources. From when the TPP was published, on November 5, 2015, until it was signed, on February 5, 2016, Canadian experts and the public had less than 90 days to assess the impact of over 7,300 pages of this agreement.
I had intended to bring the whole 7,300 pages with me today for reference, and it would have cost me over $1,100 in printing alone. I'll be the first to admit that I've been unable to read the agreement in its entirety, and I suspect that none of the members of this committee has done so either. Today I'd like to speak to just two issues, in relation to the IP chapter, which I do have here.
The first is what the TPP means for Canada's Internet. If ratified, the TPP will bring 20-year copyright term extensions to Canada, which have been widely shown by numerous experts in multiple international studies to cost consumers money and will actually make it more difficult for the next generation of artists and creators to create new works.
The Canadian government speaks sweepingly about promoting and protecting Canadian art and cultural heritage, yet the TPP will ensure that less Canadian culture is shared here at home and with the world. Additionally, the TPP will cement restrictive rules around digital locks, rules implemented in advance of Canada's entry into the TPP negotiations and later shown to be a price of entry demanded by the U.S. government.
These draconian digital locks will eliminate individuals' autonomy over their legally purchased digital devices, making it illegal, with potential criminal penalties, to modify, repair, recycle, or otherwise tinker with the digital device or its contents. These rules will further disadvantage communities whose interests we already fail to consider: the deaf, the blind, and persons with disabilities, who are often locked out of the necessary means to access knowledge—and culture, even—when trade in these necessary circumvention technologies is criminalized.
Additionally, the flawed notice-and-take-down system in the U.S. will be extended to all TPP nations. While Canada has secured an exception for our superior notice-and-notice system, this came at the price that no other TPP country, current or future, will be allowed to follow Canada's lead and work to strike a copyright balance that respects users' rights to share and collaborate while ensuring that artists are fairly compensated for their work.
In fact, this regime will see Canada's Internet censored, along with all of our TPP partners. As more and more art and culture are held captive and copyright regimes treat the rights of corporations as paramount, more legitimate legal speech will be taken down from the Web and we will see our collective cultural exchanges weaken and shrink.
As many of you may be aware, in 2017 Canada will undergo a mandatory copyright review, and none of the problems I've mentioned will be easily fixed as we live with the regulatory chill that comes along with the looming threat of multi-million- or even billion-dollar lawsuits from the TPP's ISDS mechanism.
Now, briefly I'd like to speak to the negative impacts for our economy and for Canada's digital future. We sit here today a stone's throw away from Vancouver, home to one of the fastest-growing sectors of our economy, technology and innovation. The tech sector in Vancouver alone generates more than $23 billion in revenue and $15 billion in GDP, according to Vancouver's economic commission.
Canadian innovators from BlackBerry co-founder Jim Balsillie to the CEO of Canadian tech success Shopify have raised concerns about the IP regime that serves to entrench American dominance in the innovation sector and about an agreement negotiated by a government that made no effort to consult or engage with leaders in this industry.
In particular, the anti-competitive DRM provisions block experimentation and innovation and coupled with restrictive trade secrets provisions threaten entrepreneurship and lack the necessary safeguards to protect against the abuse of these rules.
These are only two of the myriad issues that Canadians have been raising with the committee over the past month through a cooperative campaign to educate and engage Canadians through consultation on the TPP. Our tool can be found at LetsTalkTPP.ca, and already over 15,000 messages have been sent to members of Parliament, the Standing Committee on International Trade, and the international trade ministry.
OpenMedia is just one of dozens of organizations in Canada sounding the alarm about an agreement that violates our sovereignty under the cloak of secrecy and tells us that we can have our say only now, after the deal is already done.
I am here to speak to you today about the intellectual property in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but there are larger issues at play. Right now, the government is involved in a process that lacks basic, democratic legitimacy.
I am honoured to be one of only a handful of chosen witnesses from the 35 million Canadians who make up this country, but five minutes to speak to the egregious flaws in a 7,000-page agreement that took nearly 10 years to negotiate is not enough. It is not enough that Canadians are now being asked for forgiveness after being excluded from the process when we should have instead been asked for permission and our input in a manner befitting our democratic traditions.
In closing, OpenMedia and the Canadians we have consulted are eager to share more of Canada with the world through open trade policies that are developed through debate and participation by those impacted, but we are against trade agreements made in secret and closed off from the public, especially those that will negatively impact our freedom of expression and compromise our digital future.
Thank you.