Mr. Speaker, I am honoured today to talk specifically to this bill.
I was on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for a time and, a few years ago, I was involved in artistic creation in Quebec as the director of a body promoting Quebec films. I thus was made aware of the importance of the cultural industry for society as a whole, and for Quebec society in particular. It is therefore with great pleasure that I rise today in this debate on Bill C-32 on copyright.
Copyright is the bread and butter, as we say, of our artists. The diet has remained unchanged since 1924, and it is high time it was revitalized, which is what the government is attempting to do after long years of pussyfooting around.
I hope you will allow me to stress the importance of copyright for artists. As we know, the artistic community does not work from nine to five with iron clad working conditions and a pension plan to boot. Quite the opposite is true. Artists have no job security. They depend solely on their talent and on the prevailing economic situation. We can easily assume that most of them often have lean years. It is unfortunate to have to describe our artists' financial situation in such terms.
Statistics confirm our impressions, however. According to data from the Canadian Conference on the Arts, average incomes for 1991 were as follows: fine arts painters, $15,650; craftspeople, $13,156; dancers, $13,757; actors, $21,800; musicians and singers, $13,799.
No life of Riley here. It is easy to see these incomes do not provide enough for a family to live on. We are certainly getting close to the poverty line. In fact, artists are now the least paid workers in Canada.
I think it is important to put these elements in context and, before debating copyright, to reflect upon the financial situation of these people and the importance their work has for society's development.
Having established that artists are not in a privileged financial situation, far from it, I would now like to turn to Bill C-32. This bill makes major changes to the present law.
It establishes neighbouring rights for performers and producers of records. I know that the Bloc québécois has spoken in favour of neighbouring rights and has the firm intention of supporting them. It establishes a remuneration regime allowing fir the copying, for private use, of sound recordings; it establishes a protection of exclusive markets for book distributors in Canada; it changes the copyright and, finally, it changes the law to improve the collective administration and civil remedies.
Much has been written about this bill, which has given rise to a heated debate.
Before going into details, I would like to ask members to remember the very concrete importance of copyright in the life of every artist. This leads me to the loud protests of broadcasters with respect to the new neighbouring rights.
Arguing that they help artists and producers by playing their records on the air, broadcasters have demanded to be exempted from paying compensation to performers and producers. Their logic is strange. One could take it to the ridiculous extreme and say that an artist who performs in public should not be paid since it gives him or her the opportunity of making himself or herself known and then of selling more records.
Broadcasters' concerns deserve to be examined, as those of any other interested party. However, we must not forget that the first purpose of this legislative reform is to allow artists to participate in the economic success of their works. Moreover, future beneficiaries of neighbouring rights, that is performers and record producers, publicly indicated they understood the concerns of broadcasters and were ready to show some flexibility in the implementation of the new system. In such conditions, the goal of the legislation can be reached quite harmoniously while our artists will be protected.
I now wish to address another important aspect of the bill, that is exceptions to copyrights. That is where the shoe pinches, as we say. This aspect is generating a lot of questions and fears. Why? Because the present Copyright Act already contains exceptions to adapt to the needs of users. The general idea behind these exceptions is to achieve a reasonable balance between the rights of creators and the needs of users through exceptions made in the public interest.
For starters, it should be pointed at that existing exceptions are not unanimously accepted. In fact copyright comprises two kinds of complementary rights. The first kind, namely moral rights, recognizes that the author is the owner of the work and consequently of the right to authorize its use under conditions set by the author.
The second kind, economic rights, deals with the right to monitor the economic life of a given work. An exception to copyright is therefore tantamount to expropriation. For the good of the community, the government may decide that, under certain circumstances, an author will not benefit from his work.
Such expropriation is the reason why the SOCAN, the UNEQ, the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, and the Coalition des créateurs et des
titulaires de droits d'auteur, a Quebec group, have been asking for the abolition of these exceptions for a long time.
Their reasoning is quite simple. I will quote UNEQ which said: "It is always the same thing. Why should creators be the only ones to give up their revenues?" You must remember the numbers I gave you a moment ago, they are not astronomical. When you live around the poverty line, you have every right to worry about your future.
And why should they give up their revenues on behalf of schools, libraries, archives, without even being entitled to a charitable donation receipt? Why not require Xerox to supply copiers to schools free of charge and ask Petro Canada to supply them with free heating oil? Why would creators not be entitled to earn a living? Why? The question is very relevant, particularly if you think about the actual income of artists.
Instead of abolishing the exceptions as requested, the government intends to multiply them, almost ad infinitum. There will be 15 pages of exceptions, at the expense of artists. For whose benefit? We ask ourselves what pressures made the government yield, what lobby intervened, because the government is now ready to penalize the artists it claims it wants to protect.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage said today that she wanted to protect the livelihood of artists and to make sure they get some compensation for their work. I do not think the new bill is in line with that statement. There is reason to question that. The reaction to Bill C-32 in this regard was quite strong, and appropriately so. My colleagues and I will come back to the details of these exceptions during subsequent debates.
For now, however, I am asking the government: What is the reason for all those exceptions? Why is the government introducing a bill with 15 pages of exemptions in it if, like the Canadian Conference of the Arts has said, respect for the principle of free negotiation inherent to copyright involves the elimination of all exemptions in the protection of works?
I urge the government to bear in mind the arguments of the artists, who are the main stakeholders. This bill must meet their needs, both financial and moral. If artists do not survive, our cultural industry will not either.
I would like to remind the House of the position of UNEQ, a member of the Coalition of Creators and Copyright Owners. It said it will not introduce more exemptions. This organization is asking the government to eliminate all exemptions. It believes that having more exemptions for educational institutions in this bill is a direct threat to the group licenses already agreed upon by UNEQ.
I would like to give a few examples of what I have just said. Talking about licenses, I know UNEQ has had negotiations about
photocopies made by the government. My colleague was telling us a moment ago that it may be a way for the government to avoid paying certain royalties to creators. The licence negotiated by the federal government for its newspaper clipping service and copies represents a total of $80,750 in royalties that are distributed to journalists. The proposed bill would take away these royalties from artists and creators. The government would no longer pay these royalties. And that is just one example. I know several other licences were issued and will adversely affect authors and creators.
Therefore, I ask the government to be receptive to the unanimous point of view expressed by the Union des écrivains et des écrivaines, UQAM, SOCAM and all the stakeholders from the artistic community, regarding these exceptions.