Debates of Oct. 2nd, 2014

Combatting Counterfeit Products Act

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest. We saw the main problem with ACTA, and certainly the backlash in Europe. It was the attempt to blur the line between criminal counterfeiting, which we need to go after, and going after individuals who may infringe copyright but are certainly not criminal actors.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the Liberals' attempt to amend the law so that they could stop people travelling internationally and go after them for personal use. This seems to be way beyond what ACTA envisioned and way beyond what anyone else has brought forward. With statutory damages of $100,000 and limiting judges, it seems to me that we are talking about criminalizing a whole class of consumers as opposed to focusing on the real criminal element.

I would like to ask my colleague why she thinks the Liberals came forward with such an extreme position.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, trying to get into the heads of my Liberal colleagues is a very daunting proposition. I am not really prepared to do that.

I do know that when we were at committee my colleagues on our side of the committee room were quite surprised at the Liberals' approach. Every bit of expert testimony we had suggested that their proposed amendment would be a huge infringement on civil liberties. We found ourselves in the very strange position as New Democrats of voting with the Conservatives in maintaining the balance. It is indeed a very crucial balance that we tried to achieve in the bill between consumer rights and still being able to go after counterfeit goods.

I very much appreciate the question. I do not have an answer. I have no idea why the Liberals wanted to infringe civil liberties through the implementation of Bill C-8. It certainly made no sense to us.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to emphasize one of the things the Liberal Party has spoken at great lengths about. That is the importance of ensuring the safety and health of our children, in particular, as well as seniors and others. There are many benefits within the legislation that would in fact enable safer importation of pharmaceutical medications, for example. There are many fraudulent games and toys that are brought into the country that have all sorts of potential chemicals put into the paints, and so forth, which are all quite dangerous to our population, our children in particular.

I wonder if the member might want to provide some comment, if the NDP were successful at bringing any amendments, to deal with those two specific issues, pharmaceuticals and children's toys. I use those as examples.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, indeed we were. As I suggested during my speech, particularly with respect to the definition of “distinctive”, as it was rewritten in the bill, it was imperative that we return to the original so that it would be possible for people to have confidence in generic drugs and that we were not inadvertently affecting people's health and safety by making a change in the bill for which there was no demonstrable reason.

One of the things that was really fascinating to me during the committee's deliberations on the bill was the magnitude of counterfeit goods that have been coming into the country. We learned, for example, that many of the counterfeit Canada Goose goose-down jackets have chicken feces and chicken beaks instead of just down in the coats. We heard of batteries exploding and the deaths of police officers. I did not know that when one buys a Team Canada hockey jersey, the way to know whether it is a fake or it is real is to check to see if it was made in Canada. If the jersey was made in Canada, it is actually a fake.

There are all kinds of consumer issues that we need to address in a very serious way, and frankly, we need to do much more consumer education as well so that we can detect, as consumers, which goods are officially licensed and which ones are counterfeit.

[Alain Giguère, NDP, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my distinguished colleague for having so ably defended Bill C-8.

Clearly, the NDP always sides with Canadian consumers. The best example of that is when it comes to medication. The government waited three years to take medication with major defects off the market. That is a mistake that an honest and experienced leader, such as the Leader of the Opposition, would never have made. He would not have waited three years, I can tell you that.

Like all our policies, Bill C-8 is very much in line with our support for the minimum wage, our insistence that the health care cuts be reversed and our call for an inquiry into missing aboriginal women. In other words, with Bill C-8, is the NDP not demonstrating that it wants the government to work for Canadians, first and foremost?

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for the question. On raising the integrity of medicines and the health and safety of Canadians with respect to the medications that they take, he is, of course, spot on.

I think the member was referring to matters that we raised in question period here on this side of the House with respect to Apotex and the fact that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health effectively said that they raised the issue of unsafe drugs with the company but the company refused to act, as if that somehow were good enough for Canadians. Clearly, it was not.

Now, in Bill C-8, we have that issue before us again. We moved amendments in committee to make sure, as I said, that consumers would still be able to take generic drugs with the confidence that they were taking the right medication. We are now able to have generic drugs with the same shape, colour and size as the original medications precisely so that consumers can have confidence in the system. That is absolutely imperative.

The other question we have to ask ourselves is this. If we are creating this framework to keep Canadians safe, why are we cutting the resources for both the RCMP and Canadian border officials, which would make it impossible to enforce that regime?

Those resources have been cut dramatically. Over 500 full-time jobs will be gone. How can Canadians have confidence that, even with this new regime, the necessary enforcement will be there to keep them and their families safe?

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Before we resume debate, I would inform the House that we are now almost to the five-hour point in the debate, so this will be the last 20-minute speaking slot.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Surrey North.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Hamilton Mountain made a very passionate and eloquent speech on this particular bill, and I would like to thank her for providing that very useful information to the House.

I rise today on behalf of my constituents in Surrey North to speak to Bill C-8, the combating counterfeit products act. The title of the bill requires that we all agree to issues like this in the House. It is very rare that all parties agree on certain issues in the House and move forward an agenda that is in the best interests of Canadians.

It is a pleasure to speak to the bill today to support a piece of legislation on which all parties are in general agreement. Often in the House, it seems impossible to move forward and create meaningful legislation that all parties can agree on. Of course, no piece of legislation will ever be perfect to every party, but when we have the opportunity to advance the legislative agenda in this country and create legislation surrounding important issues, I gladly welcome the progress.

As members of the official opposition, it is our duty to ensure that legislation is carefully considered and questioned, and that dissenting opinions are publicly expressed and debated. However, as embodied by our late leader, Jack Layton, there is also great value in working together. I believe that the bill will be a step forward for all Canadians.

Issues surrounding counterfeiting, copyright and trademark infringement, and intellectual property are, without a doubt, complex matters that may seem far removed from the lives of normal Canadians. However, in reality, these issues have a direct impact on all Canadians, especially with regard to their health and safety. I truly believe that as elected officials, we should work to make this country as safe as possible for all citizens. Counterfeit goods have the potential to put the health and safety of Canadians at risk, and as such, it is time that we strengthened our laws against counterfeit goods.

Dealing with counterfeiting and infringement is important in protecting Canadian consumers who may unsuspectingly purchase counterfeit goods that could put their health and safety at risk. As the member for Hamilton Mountain pointed out, there is a lack of awareness with regard to counterfeit goods across the country, with many consumers not knowing whether a particular product is counterfeit or not. Certainly, more education and information for consumers would be another step that we could take to inform consumers, but that is another issue.

The talk of counterfeit products intuitively brings to mind images of the knock-off designer handbags, sunglasses and watches that we frequently see. I am sure that it is hard to imagine how these products might pose a risk to the health and safety of Canadians. These types of products breed different problems in that they undermine the value of the original product and capitalize on the creativity of another company by infringing on its intellectual property. By dealing with counterfeiting and infringement, as we are attempting to do with the bill, we will hopefully also cut down on counterfeit products of this nature, which are serious infringements on rights holders.

What concerns me most are the products that pose a health and safety risk to Canadians. While researching the bill, I read about counterfeit batteries that exploded in the desks of police officers who had stored them there. I also learned that acid leaking from counterfeit batteries has caused burns to at least eight Canadian children.

I am a parent myself. My young son is eight years old and he has a number of electronic gadgets that he plays with. It is not just my son who plays with these toys, as his friends from around the neighbourhood play with them, too. The batteries often run out and he comes to me or his mom and asks for new batteries for those gadgets. It scares me to think there are counterfeit batteries out there that my son or another child could be exposed to, which could be hazardous to their health. As a parent, I am concerned. We need to take steps to ensure that these counterfeit products are not on the market.

It is terrifying to hear that these types of goods are in our society and our kids could be using them. It scares me to think that Canadians have to fear that the batteries their children use in their remotes for their video games or TVs might injure them. This is merely one example of an ordinary household product that we unassumingly utilize in our everyday lives. We hardly expect something like this to harm us.

I will give the House one more example of counterfeiting that poses a serious health and safety risk. Just a few days ago a man from Surrey was sentenced to six months in prison in the United States for selling counterfeit vehicle airbags. All Canadians would be seriously concerned if they found they had counterfeit airbags in their cars that might not deploy properly. This is a safety device that we often take for granted. On the rare occasion that they would be used, we assume they would protect us. The consequences of counterfeit products like this not working are serious. Serious injury or even death could result. This is a prime example of a safety risk stemming from a counterfeit product. We need to protect all Canadians from this type of counterfeiting.

The technical details of Bill C-8 would add two new criminal offences under the Copyright Act: the possession of and the exportation of infringing copies and selling or offering counterfeit goods on a commercial scale.

The bill proposes to create a prohibition against importing or exporting infringing copies and counterfeit goods and introduces a balance to the prohibition by creating two exemptions: for personal use and for items in transit control. I will speak to that aspect of the bill later in my speech.

Bill C-8 would also grant ex officio powers to border officials to detain infringing copies of counterfeit goods. This is a significant policy shift as until now border guards required the private rights holder to obtain a court order before seizing infringing copies of goods. This policy change would grant much greater power to front-line officers to prevent counterfeit goods from entering the country.

Additionally, Bill C-8 would grant new ex officio powers to the Minister of Public Safety and border officials to share information on detailed goods with the rights holder.

I have another serious concern with Bill C-8 in regard to how the provisions of this legislation would be implemented.

Over the last four years, I have seen the government bring in legislation which could basically be considered a paper tiger. Legislation needs to have teeth. There also has to be the necessary resources to implement legislation that the government brings into the House. That is the case with this legislation as well.

This legislation would help Canadians look after their health, but no resources have been allocated as to how the legislation would be implemented or how CBSA would implement some of the provisions in the bill. It is extremely unclear how CBSA would implement enforcement measures introduced in Bill C-8 in the face of the cuts from budget 2008.

Budget 2012 slashed $143 million in funding to CBSA, which in turn reduced front-line officers and weakened our ability to monitor our borders. The New Democrats understand that CBSA needs to be adequately resourced in order to carry out this new work that we expect from it in a manner that does not take away from the other very important work it already performs.

This $143 million in cuts to CBSA over three years will equate to a loss of 549 full-time equivalents between now and 2015, according to this year's CBSA Report on Plans and Priorities.

The changes proposed by Bill C-8 will require that CBSA dedicate additional resources to areas such as intelligence analysis, port of entry examination and officer training. However, to accomplish the goals set out in the bill without additional funds, CBSA will have to re-allocate internal sources. This puts at risk many of the other extremely important work that CBSA perform.

If we look at some of the other bills the government brought in, on one hand, it brings in some legislation that will be tough on crime. On the other hand, it cuts funding to preventive programs that require either monitoring of individuals or reintegration of some of the people who will be out of jail. The government is creating these paper tigers, while at the same time it is not only cutting the very people who will be enforcing the legislation, but it is also cutting some of the remedial funding that is needed to ensure these kinds of laws and regulations actually work in real life.

It is very discouraging that we are trying to protect the health of safety of Canadians, of balancing that with the copyrights, while at the same time cutting the funding for the very officers who would be monitoring all of this. That is very troubling.

The men and women of the Canada Border Service Agency have the extremely important job of defending our borders in every respect, and they put their lives on the line every day to ensure our borders and our citizens are safe. The New Democrats believe that CBSA needs to be adequately funded in order to carry out the provisions of the bill effectively so it can continue to do its job without compromising its other important responsibilities in protecting our borders and our citizens. I hope the government will take steps to ensure CBSA has the resources needed to perform the duties that are being asked of it under Bill C-8.

As I mentioned earlier, I want to speak to the exceptions that are included in the bill, including the exception for personal use and for items in transit control. The personal use exemption means that border officials would not be permitted to seize copies that would be in one's possession or baggage. The provision for items in transit is also important in providing balance in the bill for items that may be destined for a location to which they are being imported lawfully. These are important exemptions to ensure that on the whole, this system is workable and cost effective.

As I mentioned earlier, budgetary restrictions on border officers already pose challenges to the implementation of the bill. These exemptions would ensure that Bill C-8 would not create longer border delays, increased searches of individual travellers as well as put an additional burden on CBSA officers.

I come from Surrey, which is only a 10 or 15-minute ride from the border, and I have already seen long lineups at the border going both ways. In the Lower Mainland of B.C., a lot of the jobs are created by tourism. As we know, one of the best places to live is British Columbia, in Surrey, Vancouver and greater Vancouver. There are a lot of visitors from the states and, likewise, Canadians go south of the border. Many times I have seen hours and hours of long lineups either to get into the United States or to come to Canada.

There should not be cuts to the very people who look after our borders. The cuts to CBSA over the last number of years, and cuts that will happen in the next few years, have put extra burden on these individuals. I hope the government takes into consideration that cutting the very people who are patrolling our borders, CBSA officers and RCMP, is going to have an impact not only on the movement of people from one side to the other, but also goods, which would hurt the economy in which we operate. It also hurts jobs. Cutting the funding for these border services officers will impact not only how we implement this bill, but will have an impact on the movement of goods and services across the border.

The New Democrats believe that intellectual property requires an approach that strikes a balance between the interests of rights holders and the interests of users and consumers. These exceptions are important provisions that work to maintain this delicate balance.

I am glad to see the Conservative government put forward legislation that essentially all parties can agree on. That is an important step in protecting both businesses and consumers in Canada. Although I am not hopeful, I hope the government will take my comments about the need for more resources to be allocated to CBSA under advisement and work to ensure the bill is implemented effectively.

The member for Hamilton Mountain talked about the New Democrats introducing amendments that would improve the bill. I have seen in other committees where the government brings in legislation, many experts testify before committee and offer very thoughtful suggestions that could improve bills further to ensure they are workable, in the best interests of Canadians and close any sort of loopholes. As usual, time after time, whether it is this bill or other bills, the government has failed to take those suggestions into consideration.

Surely, after many thousands of suggestions, whether by the official opposition, the New Democrats, or experts from many different organizations across the country, the government would consider some of those suggestions to improve bills. Time after time, it has not accepted amendments offered by us.

I hope the governing party takes my advice with regard to providing more resources and implementing Bill C-8.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the opposition party mused about a Liberal position around trying to assume some individual responsibility in this situation. I would like to ask the member this question.

Does he not think that curbing demand by individuals is also a way of managing this issue? In particular, in the riding I represent, many artists, musicians and writers suffer from copyright infringement and the transmission of that copyright across borders. Does he not think that taking steps to somehow curb the market and the demand may also be a way of protecting income and copyrights for individual artists who are suffering because it is only a systemic approach, a corporate approach, to managing this situation?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for that excellent question, and I actually agree with him in regard to the Liberal position.

I am actually puzzled by a lot of the positions they take on a number of issues. I have seen this on the issue of Iraq. The leader of the Liberal Party has a statement one day and another statement on a different day. One day he is supporting the mission, which—

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

The hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands is rising on a point of order.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to my hon. friend from Surrey North, we have limited time to debate Bill C-8 in this place, and his response has gone slightly off topic unless there are Iraqi goods to which counterfeiting measures would apply.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

The member raises the point of relevance. As all members know, members are given some latitude, and certainly making a short reference to another issue is acceptable. I am quite confident that the member for Surrey North will keep remarks relevant in general to the question.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I only brought up that issue because the member asked about the Liberal Party.

To answer his question, any time an issue or bill that concerns health and safety risks to Canadians is brought to the House, we will certainly support those kinds of initiatives, whether they are by the government or by the opposition. That is why we are here: to act in the best interests of all Canadians.

[Alain Giguère, NDP, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP will support Bill C-8. Of course we will, because this bill will protect Canadians. We are in favour of that, just as we are in favour of day care and minimum wage. Voting for a good law is fine, but making sure it gets implemented is essential. This is becoming quite scandalous; an experienced leader like the Leader of the Opposition would never have done such a thing. In this particular case, what can we expect from the legislation when the people responsible for enforcing it have had some 500 positions cut? What can we expect from a bill that does not apply to generic prescription drugs? There are criteria governing the quality of patented drugs, but the government takes no responsibility for generic drugs. That is the problem. I would like an answer about that.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we have repeatedly seen legislation in this House, whether it is first nations legislation or other, that creates paper tigers but does not allocate funding to implement some of the provisions in those bills or some of the regulations that are going to be created. The result is that the responsibility to implement those measures is downloaded to the provinces, and I have seen the impact it has on them.

If we are creating these laws and regulations, there have to be resources behind them. As I indicated earlier, there have been cuts to the funding for CBSA officers to the tune of about $143 million over three years. That is equivalent to about 549 full-time jobs.

If we are going to be creating these laws and regulations to protect Canadians, whether for health or safety reasons, then we owe it to Canadians to ensure that adequate funding and resources are available.

I do not see that from the government, either with this legislation or with other legislation that has been brought in. It has failed to provide the resources.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest, and I was rather shocked to see the Liberal position on this issue. They would go further than the Conservatives, further than the secretive agreement did, because of their desire to go after individual consumers, and this after 35,000 lawsuits against kids, mothers, and even dead people in the U.S. over downloading a song or two.

My colleague from Trinity—Spadina seems to believe that what the Liberals attempted to do is a good economic driver. They wanted to make it possible to stop people at airports, check out what they have on their iPods, find out if it was actually downloaded it from iTunes or if their kid sent it to them, and then be able to pull them out of line and charge them. Everyone recognizes that it would be an outrageous infringement of individual rights to no purpose. It would allow criminal counterfeiting gangs to carry on, but individuals would targeted.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why the Liberal Party is so out of touch with what it means to support artists in this country and to support the right of individual consumers to travel across international borders without being stopped and harassed.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am actually very puzzled by the position of the Liberals on this particular bill and the kinds of amendments they wanted to bring in. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised.

The Liberals had the opportunity to bring in measures for these sorts of issues on health and safety risks and infringements on the Copyright Act when they were in government. However, they did not bring them in back then, and I do not expect them to provide any insightful amendments for the bill before us.

The member for Timmins—James Bay is absolutely correct when he talks about how Liberals have failed to protect artists in our community and the very culture that artists create in this country. Again, I am very puzzled as to how the Liberals responded to this particular issue. It is truly amazing.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned examples of dangerous counterfeit goods, such as the acid in batteries that go in children's toys and airbags that do not deploy. That is dangerous. He believes that this is a very important bill; he said so himself.

I would like him to tell us more about how the importation of those kinds of counterfeit goods into Canada affects the health and safety of Canadians, particularly given the budget cuts at the Canada Border Services Agency.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as a parent I am very concerned about some of these counterfeit items. I talked about batteries exploding, and a number of Canadians have died from these sorts of products.

As a father of two children, I am very concerned, especially about batteries and such, because my son uses batteries in a number of different gadgets that he has.

The other case I pointed out was on the airbags that were being sold into the United States by an individual from my city. He has been jailed for six months in the United States. This is a very recent case. One would think that airbags would deploy and work properly when they are needed.

These are very serious health and safety issues for all Canadians. To detect these products and ensure that they do not come into the market, we need CBSA officers to inspect the goods that are coming in, so making cuts to the numbers of those officers is not going to help.

I encourage the government to provide the resources so that we can properly implement Bill C-8.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to rise in the House and speak to Bill C-8 on counterfeiting measures.

I have spoken many times over the last 10 years on these issues. In terms of legislative issues, often the issues regarding copyright, counterfeit, and trademark have been blurred, and there is a need to come up with coherent policies that protect citizens and rights holders.

This is not an easy situation, because we are in a market that has transformed itself incredibly since Lord Macaulay, in 1841, talked about the need to protect the writers of the time. He said we have to stop “the knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men”. Lord Macaulay believed there needed to be copyright provisions, but he also said there had to be a balance, that it was not about creating a monopoly for a certain group of book holders in London to stop upstarts who wanted to come in.

We know the story of the reason Hollywood exists. It is because California at that time was beyond the copyright laws of the Thomas Edison corporation. They moved out to the desert, not because it was beautiful but because they were the original pirate culture. They set themselves up and created an industry. The issue of these balances throughout history is a difficult act.

We have seen WIPO and ACTA, the secretive anti-counterfeiting trade agreement that received great international backlash from ordinary citizens because it was blurring the roles between domestic copyright policies, citizens' rights policies, and the issue of counterfeit.

Where this comes in is that we need to ensure that we can protect our rights holders and citizens from the counterfeit goods and bootleg operations that are undermining our economy. We need to ensure that we have the tools to go up against them.

When we see large corporate rights holders say they want to spread that across the board, we end up with an overreach, as with my colleagues in the Liberal Party saying we should go after individuals when a kid downloads a song and sends it to three friends.

The United States attempted, through its Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the 1990s, to create a legalistic response to the issues the digital culture was creating. After 35,000 lawsuits against citizens, the market did not come back. What was missing from the market at that time was a coherent plan for the remuneration of artists, who were facing some very difficult and challenging conditions because of the ease of copying. It used to be the only people who could actually copy were the ones who had the means of production, the bookbinders and record companies, but suddenly ordinary citizens could make copies, so the right to make copies became very challenged.

Canada had come up with one of the those solutions, which was the private copying levy. We recognized in Canada that people were going to make all manner of copies and that it would be impossible to remunerate artists for all the copying going on, so for every cassette that was produced, a few pennies were put aside into a fund for artists. The decision by the Conservative government to kill the private copying levy has cost the Canadian music industry $25 million a year. Given the conditions of the music industry in Canada, that is $25 million we cannot afford to lose.

Under the latest copyright act, the government killed the mechanical royalties for musicians and for the record industry, which is millions more. At a time when the artistic culture of our country is suffering very much, the need to remunerate those artists has been steadily whacked away. There is the issue of collective copying regimes in schools. It certainly needs to be updated because of the digital culture, but to simply undermine it would leave artists working for free and would make the intellectual and artistic development of our country much more challenged.

The other issue we are seeing now is the copyright board's rules on live streaming. In the United States, it is an abysmal situation. As an example, Lady Gaga was paid $162 in royalties for over a million plays. I think that was through Spotify, the streaming service.

For someone of the magnitude of Lady Gaga to receive a $162 cheque shows you just how impossible it is for any other mid-size artist to make a living and run a business doing the kind of music that is Canada's premier export. We can talk about our oil and gas and mining, but the talent that has come out of Canada in terms of music, our artists, playwrights, internationally, this is an industry that we cannot afford to undermine anymore.

In the United States the streaming royalties set by its copyright tariffs are so low that it is undermining the ability of any artist to survive. The Copyright Board of Canada has set it at 10% of the American rate. Therefore, they are living as paupers in the United States with what their copyright board has set for this new medium and in Canada it is only 10% of what the rate is in the United States. We would assume then if Lady Gaga had one million plays in Canada, she would get $16.50, which would make anyone decide to go and work at Tim Hortons rather than be an artist in this country.

Those are the issues we are facing in terms of the need to protect our artists. How do we protect our artists? We do not criminalize the consumer. We create a monetary stream. That is a reasonable solution. In terms of counterfeiting we have to separate the issues around protecting our artists and giving them the tools they need to be able to prosper, from the issues around being able to go after the counterfeit gangs.

I will stay on the artists' situation for one more minute. Where we have small businesses or small creative artists, if their trademarks or arts are taken by some counterfeit gang in China and reproduced, they have no mechanisms to go after them. Individual and small rights holders have no ability to go after these counterfeit operations. Sony and Warner Bros. can, but the individual creative rights holders who has their work stolen has no ability. If we are looking at international trade agreements, how do we provide provisions so that the small creative artists who are having their works stolen can respond?

The bill is really an attempt to bring Canada in line with what came out of the ACTA negotiations, which were secretive. It was an overreach. It was a process too beset by lobbyists to be credible and when it came to the public, there was a huge backlash. It was interesting to see that the backlash was in Europe. Therefore, we see some of these provisions have been modified somewhat.

Now the border guards are able to seize counterfeit goods at the border. That is a good provision because rights holders actually had to go to court and get a court order before, so it was very difficult. Giving border guards the ability to seize goods at the border is a reasonable solution to dealing with criminal counterfeiters. Counterfeit operations undermine our economy and they also undermine basic health and security in this country.

Again, I want to point out that our Liberal colleagues wanted to extend this to be able to go after individuals who are travelling, which would have made it the ultimate harassment tool for anyone travelling anywhere internationally. You could be pulled out of a line and told that officials wanted to look at your iPod and go through every one of your songs. My kids send me songs that they have downloaded, maybe from iTunes, but I would be liable for that. That would be an overreach, so the Liberal position of going after individuals and criminalizing individuals when the focus of our border guards should be going after the criminal gangs is very wrong-headed and out of step with pretty much the rest of the world, although maybe North Korea might side with them on that one.

If we are going to have counterfeit laws we need the resources so that border guards can go after counterfeiters. We have seen massive cuts in border services. We also need resources for the police because they still do not often see that this is an issue, going after the knock-off goods, going after the bootlegged DVDs. Perhaps we need to look at provisions that provide our police services with the incentive to clean up some of the illegal trades in goods that have undermined our economy and undermined safety for Canadians.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Before I go to questions and comments, I would just remind hon. members to address their questions and comments to the Chair. A couple of times this morning in the questions, members used the structure of “Mr. Speaker, through you to the member, why did you do this or why did you say that”. Members cannot do indirectly what they cannot do directly.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Jeanne-Le Ber.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Timmins—James Bay for his very eloquent understanding of the situation. We did work together on the committee for Bill C-11 to reform copyright.

I would ask the member if he could comment further on these issues. He was speaking about the issues regarding artists and the limitations now placed on the remuneration for artists because of the changes to the mechanical rights regime, the copyright regime and the private copying regime. He spoke about how that differs, for example, from the more tangible counterfeiting of DVDs, Prada bags, or things that can be seized at the border.

Could the member comment a little bit about how he sees it being more difficult, if he does, in finding remuneration for artists under this copyright regime, as opposed to simply seizing goods at the border?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, in 1928, the recording industry in the United States collapsed. It was the biggest single loss in the history of the recording industry. It happened because the radio came in. Why buy records when people could listen to the radio?

The industry was in deep crisis until it found a solution where it forced the radio stations to pay a share. Part of the reason that people were listening to the radio was because they were listening to music. That remuneration stream then brought in an unprecedented artistic development of artists across North America and Europe because they were able to be paid.

What we are seeing now in this changing culture is that artists have incredible new opportunities for getting their product out there, but they do not have any way to get paid. It is decimating our artists at a time when they have incredible international opportunities.

The issue is needing a balance. We have to find a remuneration monetization stream for our artists, but our legal issues need to be focused on going after the counterfeiters and bootleggers who are undermining the overall economy with commercial operations that use products and sell them, making money off of the backs of other people's work.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is clearly very knowledgeable about the subject. That is why I would like him to contrast the New Democrats' approach to the Liberals' and Conservatives', especially with respect to striking a balance between the rights of consumers and those of artists.