Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the intervention by the member for Windsor West on the matter of the iPod tax. He said that the Copyright Board should have the ability to set the rate. For clarification, as the debate was going on and the NDP consistently advocated for a tax on recording devices, including iPods, that may be extended to other things, in 2008 the Canadian Private Copying Collective which is responsible for this area put forward a proposal. It is published in the Canada Gazette:
—the Copyright Board hereby publishes the statement filed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) on January 31, 2007, with respect to the levies it proposes to collect, effective January 1, 2008, on the sale, in Canada, of blank audio recording media.
In the area marked “Levy”, it states:
Subject to subsection (2), the levy rates shall be...
(e) for digital audio recorders, $5 for each recorder with no more than 1 Gigabyte (GB) of memory, $25 for each recorder with more than 1 GB and no more than 10 GB of memory, $50 for each recorder with more than 10 GB and no more than 30 GB of memory, and $75 for each recorder with more than 30 GB of memory.
That covers most iPods that people are purchasing today.
The member for Windsor West said that the Copyright Board should have the ability to set those levies. During most of the debate on this, those were the numbers on the table in terms of what the Canadian Private Copying Collective had put forward.
I want to know whether the hon. member supports the member for Windsor West in saying that should be the way the iPod tax is handled.