Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise on this issue, which is vitally important for Canada. The need to update Canada's copyright legislation is something that the New Democrats have been pushing the current government and the previous Liberal government on for the better part of the last decade.
The problem is that this bill fails. It fails the rights of artists. It is an attack on the royalty regimes that it created, not just an incredible worldwide industry but also a sense of identity of culture that has created the importance of ensuring we have a voice. That voice is actually created within the marketplace of copyright, which I will get to in a moment. It attacks education, students and people with perceptual disabilities.
The government did not need to go down this road. We could have worked with the government. We were more than willing to work with it and we said it again and again. There are elements in the bill that are much better than the previous Conservative bill, which looked like a dog's breakfast when we considered how badly it was constructed, but this bill could have been fixed.
At the outset, we said that this did not need to be an ideological fight. We all have a stake in improving copyright. Unfortunately, the government does not know how to do to anything except in an ideological way. The government's idea of balance is that it is its way or the highway. Its idea of balance is that anybody who does not agree with it is a threat, which is why it had to go to such extreme measures as threatening Parks Canada employees, telling them that if they embarrassed the hapless parks minister their jobs would be on the line. It seems that the public servants of Canada, whose job it is to be public servants to Canadians, are to be the loyal soldiers of the Conservative Party or they are threatened.
We have seen how the government destroyed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. We know now why. It is because it had—