Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise to voice my strongest objections to this part of the bill.
I really would like to urge the minister, who is listening carefully, and all the other members who in the red book promised to have free votes, to exercise that free vote, to vote against this bill unless this part is amended right out of there.
I remember when I was a young man in high school, there was one time our biology teacher had to leave the classroom. I was busily working quietly. We had a rule in my generation that whether the teacher was there or not, there was a lot of silence in the classroom. It was strictly enforced.
Some of my classmates started talking. Bless his heart,Mr. Harold J. Newlove, my famous biology teacher, came into the classroom to find the place in general pandemonium. He declared a penalty. Everyone would stay after school.
I tell you the truth, Mr. Speaker, I was not involved in that. I went to Mr. Harold J. Newlove and I said to him: "Sir, I have to catch a bus because I am one of these rural students. I have to get home to help my family with farm chores. I have to get away from here. Otherwise I need to walk four miles to get home. Can I please be exempted on the assurance that I was not involved? I am not guilty". Mr. Newlove said: "If I make an exception for you, where will it end? You will stay". You do not know how injured I was because I was innocent.
This is the fundamental premise in this part of this bill which is false. It assumes that if I go into a store to buy a tape that is blank I am going to commit a crime with it. What backward thinking that is. Why would even the Liberals, as they believe in the common goodness of all people, now suddenly come to the conclusion that there would be even one person in the country who would break the copyright laws?
I recognize the harsh reality is that some people do this, but to pass a law that causes every other person to pay the penalty for the person who actually did break the law I think is a violation of our fundamental sense of justice. We should all be outraged, as I was when I was in high school. That is the first point. We ought not to be punishing people for crimes they did not commit.
Second, and this I think is just as important, I believe that it is wrong to, by supposing that someone is going to break the law, make them pay the penalty in advance.
I read a statistic not too long ago that in the city of Ottawa the average person drives about 20 kilometres an hour over the speed limit. Judging by the cabs I have ridden in it is about 100 per cent over. Instead of going through that costly exercise of having police persons with radar and all of these other things, why do we not put a boundary around the city and everyone who comes in we will charge them all $100, a payment in advance of their speeding fine which we know that they will commit?
If we did that we could say to them go ahead and speed. Would we say that? What is the purpose of that speeding law? Is it not to protect, in the case of vehicles, the lives and the property of all of us?
If we have a copyright law, the copyright law has the purpose of protecting the property of the creator of the property. I know of which I speak. I happen to be a mathematician, a low level one but I casually sometimes admit to it, and I have some experience with computing. For a while I used to write computer programs and I used to then sell them. I used to first give them away because people liked some of the things I did and I was a generous guy and I said go ahead and have a copy of that program. Then someone said why not sell them.
When desktop computers came along, we had these little diskettes and I could put my programs on to those diskettes. I realized very quickly that there were some people who were making illegal copies, even of my stuff. I found out about it surreptitiously. I accidentally found out about it.
I put a notice in all of my programs that said: "If you have made a copy of this program and you did not pay for it to Epp Software, here is the address where you can send your royalties". I received some money in the mail because there were some people who said they liked that program and wanted to know where they could get it. Everybody who had a copy of the program said "copy it and send Ken Epp 10 bucks and he's happy".
I got a bit of money, not very much, I will admit that, but I got a bit of income from that because I asked people to be honest. For the others, I cannot do that. I do believe in the ownership of property but I do not believe that I would want to charge a person a penalty for stealing my property before he does it in the anticipation that he will. This raises a very very fundamental question of justice.
Picture me walking into a store and buying a case of C-60s, the little cassette tapes. Included in the price is an amount which will come to about a dollar by the time we are all finished, as my colleague mentioned, because we will pay GST and HST and BST and mark-ups and all of this stuff on that original 30 cents to50 cents, which I predict will soon grow to $1 or $2. Once the
government gets its fingers on a source of income it loves to make it greater. I will have paid on my little case of C-60s maybe $10.
My teenage son will now say to me "dad can I take one of your tapes because I want to make a copy of this CD I have to give to my friend?" When my kids even suggested they would do that I gave them a blanket "no, that is not legal and we do not do that".
Is it now legal? Can my son now argue with me and say we have already paid for the copyright on that thing by paying this special levy on the tapes we bought? Is it now legitimate that this Liberal government would say it will put a tax on the tape to allow people to break a law? That is absurd.
That is why I emphatically ask the minister to reconsider, to use some commons sense and think this through. I urge the members of that huge majority governing party to think about what they are doing and to read their red book again. Remember the one that said more free votes? Here is one. Here is a point.
My point is that they have it in their power to force the minister, to cajole the minister, to persuade the minister or whatever method they use, to get this very offensive part out of this bill. One way of doing that is to simply vote in favour of our member's amendment. It is the motion that says let us rescind this part that pretaxes breaking the law or that causes me to pay the penalty for other people breaking the law. Let us rescind that. If all members vote in favour of that it will pass and we will have accomplished something. We in this House will have done the right thing on this issue. I strongly urge them to do that.
I will be watching because if they do not, then when I go back to my people during the next election campaign I will have a moral obligation to tell them that they have had, courtesy of this Liberal government, this very strange law passed. I think they would even be ashamed at that. I am sure they will all support it and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this.