Madam Speaker, first, I agree with the point on which my hon. colleague began and ended his speech.
Yes, we are open to suggestions on how to improve this and ensure this goes forward. I appreciate the NDP's support to send the bill to a legislative committee. The reason why we would want to send it to a legislative committee, as I said, is so we can be open to receiving ideas that make sense.
I did want to push back and perhaps disagree with my hon. colleague, and he will have the last word to disagree with my disagreement. I have a couple of points.
First, I agree with him. Obviously the DMCA experience in the United States is something that we chose not to do as a government. We chose not to go in that direction.
There is one key element of the DMCA in the United States that he and I agree on and that we do not think is a good Canadian policy, and that is the idea of notice and take-down, which is in the American dynamic. We have proposed in the legislation notice and notice. We think that is pro-consumer and errs on the right of individual citizens rather than the presumption of guilt. We think that is the right thing to do.
His private member's bill with regard to the private copying levy is badly written. It is one thing to criticize the government for what is in the bill and another to criticize it for not putting things in the bill. There is a reason it does not address the private copying levy in the legislation. The proposals that came forward in our consultations were just unworkable. They did not make sense in the modern era.
The member's private member's bill is, with respect, badly written and it would not pass through the House of Commons even though the member may have some allies on the other side of the House of Commons who agree with him in principle. The member's own proposal is, frankly, unworkable.
With regard to education and libraries, the member criticized some elements of the bill. By the way, this is a perfect example in this very debate about the balance that our government has tried to strike. The Liberal critic for industry has said that our government has gone too far in support of students and suggested that we had not done enough to allow people who wrote textbooks to be compensated. My hon. colleague is saying that the things we put in place in the legislation with regard to education materials after a course is done go too far in the other direction.
Therefore, we have tried to strike the right balance. Did we get it right in the end? Well, time will tell. We think we have given a real genuine effort here to try to get it right.
With regard to libraries, the member said that librarians were upset about the legislation. That is factually not true. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries said, “we applaud the government”. It said that it had responded to the copyright reform concerns expressed by the library and education community. It said that the government had clearly listened to what the library and education community had said.
This is what we have tried to do with the bill. We have tried to get it right. If the member has a reasonable proposal, he should bring it forward. We tabled the legislation five months ago. We are waiting for substantive, specific amendments to it, which will actually improve it and ensure that Canada stays on the cutting edge of intellectual property law.