Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague and I have shared many royalty payments together over the years. He will know, as I do, that the greatest theft from musicians everywhere has never been necessarily piracy, but the line in the recording contract that was called “recoupable”. It enabled the recording industry to recoup every possible dime that it might have ever spent off their royalty payments.
Therefore, the issue of mechanical royalties for a musician is essential. The radio mechanical royalty is in many ways some of the only real revenue an artist sees, but the government has decided that $20 million in mechanical royalty revenue to Canadian artists is something artists do not need and is giving it to the big broadcasters. The broadcasters will not have to pay a royalty right that they have had to pay for years. That money is being directly robbed from artists.
In no other system that I know of has it been decided that people who had a right to earn a living no longer have that right. The Conservatives call that “balanced”; we call it wrong.