Mr. Speaker, I want to cover a few points which have been raised on used textbooks. Hon. members are shortchanging the ability of Canadians to take care of business.
I refer to my experience a few years back when I was at the University of Ottawa. We had the problem of not being able to access used books. We set up our own used bookstore. Nothing in this bill prevents Canadians, be they students, be they entrepreneurs, be they book publishers, from doing that. Nothing prevents people from putting in place organizations and mechanisms to recycle books.
To make the argument that somehow, some way, this bill would banish the recycling of textbooks is erroneous. I believe it is appropriate to highlight that point.
Be they campus driven books, used book stores, Canadian publishers and so forth, nothing in this legislation will prevent that from happening. The intent of the legislation is to prohibit those who would circumvent the legislation from doing that by selling
into Canada books which have not initially been sold according to exclusive distributorship agreements. That is what is intended and nothing else.
I would hope that the members speaking to this point would understand that and not create a false sense of alarm.
That is essentially what I wanted to point out on this particular amendment.