Mr. Speaker, I intended to speak briefly on this and talk about the insertion of clause 21 and the effect it has on the legislation, but after listening to my friend from Drummond who raised a number of very interesting topics, I probably will comment on them briefly also.
First, in relation to the answer she gave to the member for Jonquière, let me say that I agree with her fully. If there is going to be a board appointed, certainly it has to be a qualified, independent board. Too often we have seen people appointed to boards and agencies because of who they are rather than what they can do or what they can represent; if one is a friend of a minister or whatever, one gets an appointment. That is not the way it should be unless the people are qualified. That is the name of the political game: people like to appoint friends. That is okay if the friends are qualified. Nobody will argue if that is the case, so let us look forward to who will be represented on the board, if we ever get that far.
However, the bill before us, Bill C-36, is a bill that would integrate the National Library and the National Archives of Canada. Both are separate now but would be brought under one entity to be known as the Library and Archives of Canada.
Originally a lot of people looked at this and said it probably makes sense. However, in analyzing what is really happening here, a number of concerns or doubts are raised. The member for Drummond really laid on the table the concerns that a number of people in different parts of the country face, especially in the older parts of the country.
Having said that, before I get into that aspect of the discussion let me say on clause 21 that what has happened here is something we do not see too often. There is an old saying that there is honour among thieves, and I guess that usually there is honour among politicians. When an agreement is negotiated, as was mentioned earlier today by one of the Alliance members, we expect people to live up to that agreement. The heritage committee basically agreed to take out clause 21. Everyone else seemed relatively happy with the remaining legislation, so they were very surprised that a meeting was called which conveniently happened at a time when the majority of the people there were not only Liberals but Liberals with vested interests, and we saw the clause put in.
This is the interesting question to ask in relation to all of this: Who was pressuring whom to have that clause put back into the bill? Unfortunately it seems completely and utterly out of place; there is no reason for it except that somebody for somebody's own interest wanted the insertion, and some members, being pressured, tried to make sure it was done. It had to go in somewhere so I guess the only piece of legislation that was coming in the near future anywhere near the type that could incorporate such a clause was this piece of legislation.
The clause itself basically states that for unpublished works the law limited the rights of the author's estate to 50 years after his or her death, plus a six year window for the estate to either publish or communicate an intention to do so. It seems pretty reasonable. That was before 1997. An estate had perpetual copyright for posthumous unpublished writings.
The new bill adds between 14 and 34 years of copyright for unpublished works, but only for those authors who died between January 1, 1930 and January 1, 1949. When one starts setting parameters, one raises suspicions. Of course it is called the Lucy Maud Montgomery clause, simply because the estate is pushing for this recognition and Ms. Montgomery, of course, died in 1942.
There are a couple of interesting comments from well known people in the literary and historical field. Mr. Donald LePan, president of Broadview Press, is on record as saying that these copyright provisions in Bill C-36 represent, in his words:
...one of the several significant threats on the current horizon for the public domain. Copyright restrictions in Canada are already more stringent than they need be. It is crucial that we resist further incursions into the public domain.
Therefore, why would such a clause be inserted in a bill such as this? The question is, who will benefit from the provisions of Bill C-36? It is often claimed that authors as a whole benefit from extending copyright provisions. In practice, however, it is typically only a handful of the best known and most enduringly successful writers whose heirs benefit from such provisions in any significant financial way. Very few people, or the estates of very few people, would benefit from such a clause being inserted in the bill. Unfortunately, it puts a bad taste on the piece of legislation and how all of this transpired.
Having said that, we will deal with that when the time comes to vote. Maybe between now and the time we do vote on the bill there will be some method to deal with this, even though nobody made an amendment to the bill simply because a guarantee was given at the committee level that this clause would be taken out. Perhaps the minister, in her wisdom, or the parliamentary secretary who today seems to slam the door shut on any further changes, will find some mechanism to deal with this unfortunate intrusion into the bill.
But even in regard to the bill itself, when we start to look carefully at it, I think we have to ask a number of questions that were raised, especially by the member for Drummond. She talked about interpreting Canada's history and she expressed a major concern about the interpretation of the history of her own province. As we know, Quebec is not just an ordinary province. It is one of the major sections of the country and has a unique history, that of the early days of Canadian history, the days of settlement, long before the west was discovered and before anyone heard the expression “go west, young man,” which I think is probably an American expression. I visited one of the old forts in Saskatchewan. I was taken there because it is an historic site. It is 150 or 200 years old. To the people who took us there, it was extremely historic.
I come from a province which was settled by the Norse in the year 1000. We celebrated the millennium of Newfoundland and Labrador only three years ago. In the western world from a European settlement perspective, Newfoundland and Labrador is by far the oldest, settled part of the new world. When it came to a permanent, established settlement, in 1497 John Cabot landed in Newfoundland and shortly afterward we had an influx of European fishermen. In fact, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River, he visited a little community in Newfoundland, Renews, and took on water. That happens to be my hometown, where I still live. John Denis, who visited in 1502, I believe, just five years after Cabot, wintered his boats in that same harbour.
Newfoundland and Labrador being the gateway into America, not only was it the first point of landing from a settlement perspective. Let us look at recorded settlement. Because of the way in which the British and the French operated, recorded settlement was only created or historically noted when a king or queen would send out somebody to establish a formal settlement, and then we would say that the first settlement in Quebec, the first settlement in Newfoundland, the first settlement in Nova Scotia, et cetera, was a certain place, but that is not the case.
Long before any established settlement was formally recognized by the king or the queen, we had many settlements all around our coast because people went there to fish. They left some of the big ships. They jumped ship and they settled in the little communities. Even though they were not allowed to, they came and stayed and the communities grew. We had significant community growth in eastern Canada long before the days of these formal settlements. History books say that John Guy established the first settlement in Newfoundland in 1610 with the colony at Cupids, but we had people living in parts of Newfoundland and a number of families in communities 110 years before that.
We have to be very much aware of our history or we can lose it. I mentioned earlier that Quebec is unique. It certainly is, because it was the French and the English who really founded this country. We could argue who did the most exploring or whatever, and people could make arguments for both sides, but they played a tremendous role in the development of this country. The two founding nations set up the eastern part of the country in particular, but not only did they establish and settle there, they moved westward. They moved down into the United States. North America generally benefited from the establishment of solid settlements by these two great founding nations.
The development of settlements in this country and the work that was done by these French and English pioneers should not just be lost by lumping together today's sort of perspective of Canada. It is not that way. Certainly from a Newfoundland and Labrador perspective, we cannot forget our part because our province also is unique. When we talk about lumping the history of Canada into one avenue, one of the concerns is that we wonder sometimes how much of the real history is going to be lost. We did not become part of Canada until 1949. Long before that, the Province of Newfoundland, as it was called, made a significant contribution to the North American scene, and not only to the North American scene but to the international scene. Whether it was in trade or in representing our country generally and our hemisphere in the first and second world wars, we were there as a country.
I believe that Newfoundland is the only country in the world that ever gave up its own independence freely. We wonder sometimes if we did the right thing or not; however, there is always the second time around.
We cannot in any way, through the establishment or the integration of any of our agencies, lose the true perspective of Canadian history, whether it be the Province of Quebec with its uniqueness, as I have mentioned, or whether it be the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador with its uniqueness in culture and history.
We must ensure that these things are properly recognized. We cannot overlook the involvement of the provinces in all this. We cannot lose control of our own perspective. People have a way of changing things to suit themselves, which is always a concern. History as written should be history as created. We do not see a lot of that. We see too many convenient interpretations of Canadian history.
We do have concerns with the legislation. We have particular concerns with regard to the games that are being played to insert clause 21. This might be a good time to take our time in dealing with the legislation and to fully analyze and debate how the history of our great country is being and will be recorded and preserved.
As individual players are we getting a fair share and a fair shake? Are we being recognized for our contributions and, more specifically, are the provinces and our founding fathers being accurately recognized for their contributions to our country?