Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, we are learning now that HIV first appeared in the 1920s in Kinshasa. It circled around, it died out, it morphed, it came back, and it formed again until it reached a point where it became the virulent killer of the latter part of the 20th century.

No one should be surprised about what is happening with Ebola. It has appeared a number of times. The World Health Organization has been aware of it. However, this latest outbreak has carried on with absolutely no awareness or no interest, it seems, from western powers because it was in poor African countries like Sierra Leone and others. Now we are facing potentially 10,000 new cases a week. We can make many incriminations looking back, but this was staring us in the face: the need for an international response to prevent this pathogen from getting to the point where it is now.

What does my hon. colleague think we need to do to learn lessons from this and to make sure that we hopefully will not see 10,000 deaths a week? We seem condemned to learn these lessons again and again, as governments do not pay attention to the importance of public health. What does my hon. colleague think?

[Petitions, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud today to rise to present this petition signed by many people in the Kirkland Lake, Virginiatown, and Larder Lake region. The petitioners are concerned over the right of Canadian farmers to save, reuse, select, and exchange seeds. This is something that has been a right of farmers going back to the very beginning of agriculture, and there is a very real concern among people who have been involved in agriculture that their ability to maintain this tradition be protected under the proposed changes we are seeing, particularly with Bill C-18 and the plant breeders' rights.

I would like to present these concerns to the House.

[Canadian Heritage, October 20th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, here is a riddle. How can we tell that the Conservatives know they will not be government in 2017?

The answer is that they are blowing through the anniversary budget for the 150th celebration of Confederation now, three years before festivities, but more significantly, before the coming election.

We have a government that says, “No money for veterans, no money for seniors, no money for child care”, but has an endless bucket of taxpayers' money for self-promotion.

Would the government just stop this egregious abuse of taxpayers' trust?

[National Fiddling Day Act, October 7th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay. Of course, I could not begin without talking about the incredible fiddling history of James Bay, where the Cree fiddlers, going back to the 1600s, have maintained an incredible culture of fiddle and dance.

I have to say at the outset that I keep a fiddle in my closet. It haunts me. I cannot play it. The G–D–A–E fingering is probably the easiest fingering on the planet, but the ability to use the bow with the right hand is the difference between beauty and art and criminal activity. I have tried the right hand, and I have not been able to master it. However, I would like to speak to this.

I have to also say at the outset that I have heard incredible fiddling across this country, and I have had the great honour to play in the Grievous Angels with that incredible fiddler Peter Jellard, who is a master at Acadian, Quebecois, and traditional Irish fiddling.

My personal love is Cape Breton fiddling. My family were Cape Breton miners who were exiled. They had to follow the work. Also living in Timmins was Buddy MacMaster, the famous Cape Breton fiddler. He was born in Timmins, because the Cape Bretoners had to go north to work. It was the Fort Mac of the 1920s and 1930s.

My grandfather was a traditional Cape Bretoner. He had a fiddle and a piano. If we wanted music, he played one or the other or both, so we would have Saturday night ceilidhs. My grandfather was a purest. He did not believe in records. My aunts and mom wanted to listen to rock and roll and Elvis Presley. It hit them that a way to get my grandfather to allow a record player in the house was to bring Cape Breton fiddle records home, so we grew up on Winston “Scotty” Fitzgerald, John Allan Cameron, and the whole Celtic tradition in our neighbourhood, in this little miner's house in the Moneta district in Timmins. The Italian and francophone neighbours would come over on Saturday nights, and we would have a traditional Cape Breton ceilidh, and the music would go into the early hours of the morning.

Not being able to fiddle, I realized early on that if I could sing, I could stay up. As long as I knew the songs, I could stay up. I could stay up all night. The second I ran out of songs, they noticed, and I was sent to bed, so I might not be a very competent singer, but I knew all the words.

I would like to speak about the uniqueness of the fiddle as an instrument. I have played across Canada. I have learned a number of lessons from playing shows from the far Arctic to biker bars in southwestern Ontario, from the east coast over to the mountains. There is a distinct difference between how people respond when they hear the fiddle and any other instrument.

I will tell members a couple of stories. I was in Great Whale River up in upper James Bay in Quebec in the early 1990s playing with our band. There was only one place to eat. It was a Quonset hut run by Hydro Quebec. It was the only place to eat for 600 kilometres. They took a look at four or five scruffy tête carrés and said, “We're not feeding you”. We could have fought with them, but they were the law of the land. It was their restaurant, and they were not feeding us. Rather than fight, we sat down, and our fiddler took out the fiddle and began to play La Bastringue, and immediately they came out from behind, they called their friends over from the other Quonset huts, and they told us that we could eat there all day, as long as we wanted. In fact, they did not want us to go to the show that night. That is not an exception.

I played in many locations, when we were much younger, where we were literally playing in very hostile professional biker bars. We would always start with a fiddle tune. A fiddle tune immediately made us family. There is a sense with the fiddle that puts people in a place, and many Canadian people do not quite know where that place is. It is a place where their family is from. It is a village in their mind. They know that if they walk into that village, they will always be welcome. What is fascinating about this village is that it does not matter in the mind if this village is in Acadie, Jonquière, Poste-de-la-Baleine, the Ottawa Valley, Cape Breton, northern Ontario, or the Red River in western Canada. It is the place we all know that when we are there, we somehow belong.

I am not just making these claims. I know. I have tried it as a singer. It does not cut across all manner of cultural representations unless one is absolutely fantastic. If one is a saxophonist, some people like the sax, and some people do not. Everyone plays the guitar. Same with the piano, but there is something about a fiddle being played that brings that sense of identity, even if that person does not know the song. Whether it is Quebec fiddling or Acadian fiddling or western fiddling, one would immediately say that is from us.

What is it about the fiddle? It is the people's instrument, because it is simple. It is portable. The fingering is very easy to remember for the many complex jigs and reels with the G-D-A-E fingering. It is intuitive. Also, it does not need amplification. One could go to a village dance on a Saturday, and with nothing else, with no other band, the fiddle itself could be heard above the crowd.

There are incredible numbers of young fiddlers out there. This is not a dying art by any means. What we see is incredible talent right across this country. However, what has mostly disappeared, although not entirely, is the audience role, because the fiddle was not mean to be just listened to; it was meant to be danced to. The strathspeys, the reels, and the jigs followed set patterns. The audience did not need a caller to tell them how to dance, because they knew.

At a traditional country dance where the fiddle is still played, one notices a unique relationship between the instrument and the audience that does not exist if one is simply there to listen. The audience, with the movement of the feet, sets the rhythm. We see this in step dancing. The feet set the rhythm, and it is a natural rhythm that plays to the fiddle. There are many elements.

There is another interesting element, because it is not a fretted instrument, so there is a proximity to tonality. If the fiddlers are very good, it creates an incredible warmth. It is just like a big band with its horn section. If they are really good, a proximity of tonality creates a warmth. If they are not good, it is literally like scratching down a blackboard. We always see the images of a young child learning the violin, because it is brutal. It is the sense of warmth and the fragility of the instrument that actually allows it to cut through the sound, and it creates a different relationship with people.

When we talk about who we are as Canadians, we cannot really talk about ourselves unless we think of that village that still exists. Whether people have moved away, whether people have moved on, whether people have hip-hop pants, or whether people have not been back to that village in their minds, when they hear it, there is a cultural memory that puts them in a place, and that place is Canada.

The idea that we would celebrate this is really important, because we see that the fiddle culture has gone through waves of recognition and diminution as other forms of music have taken over.

When I was young, even though our family was very close to the Cape Breton culture there was a sense that it was a dying culture. Then we saw in the 1990s a whole growth of the new Celtic movement and many young people coming forward. In Quebec, we see that the continued strength of traditional music is still rooted in the traditional songs, with the call and response, but there is also the role of the fiddle. Take the fiddle out, and something fundamental is missing. We can go into a dance club now and see the fiddle.

This again is not to undermine the incredible role of the violin. The violin is the same instrument. For the layperson at home, the violin is a fiddle. However, the fiddle we are talking about is the traditional culture, the traditional music, the reels, the strathspeys, the jigs, and in the case of Cape Breton, the incredibly beautiful slow airs that are the people's music. It does not need amplification. It does not need a record label. It does not need anything except the ability of someone to play it and someone to dance.

I am very proud to get up tonight to speak about the role of the fiddle and its importance. For all those young bands out there, believe me, if they ever get themselves into trouble, if they have a good fiddler with them, it will get them through anything. If they need gas anyplace, if they need to get fed, they should have a good fiddler. If they have a bad fiddler, I cannot make any promises about how they are going to make out crossing this country.

[Electoral Reform, October 7th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, if there had been no costs, they would have released that, would they not?

Just because something is embarrassing to the minister does not mean that he gets to hide behind access to information. He led a personal vendetta against the integrity of Elections Canada. He is now trying to hide the cost of this from Canadians. Now he tells us that it did not cost anything; yet he used cabinet confidence to keep it from Canadians.

He cannot have it both ways. Why does the minister not just stand up and tell Canadians why he is trying to hide behind cabinet confidence and using access to information to deny Canadians basic information about the spending of government?

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, October 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening all day and my Conservative colleagues keep heckling that we are going to go kill bad guys.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague if the government has defined who the bad guys are. We understand now that Hezbollah, which the government says is a terrorist organization, is fighting ISIS. Muqtada al-Sadr has said that he is going to shake the ground. Is he now our friend? Is the Al-Battar Brigade, which is considered a terrorist group that is fighting ISIS, now our friend? Ankara has said that unless we attack Assad they are not coming in, and yet Assad is fighting ISIS.

We have a bunch of Conservative backbenchers who are hell-bent to send bombers over, and tell us they are going to fight bad guys, when they have not defined who the good guys are and who we will be fighting alongside.

What is it about this mission that the Conservatives have not thought through?

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I find this a fascinating discussion. There was a period of time when my family left northern Ontario and moved to Scarborough in the mid-seventies. When we moved to Warden—Finch, the backyard of our home was farmers' fields. People told me how 10 years before at Ellesmere it had been farmers' fields. Anyone wanting to date a Markham girl had to drive through miles and miles of cornfields before getting to the centre of Markham. That is all gone now. It has been heavily transformed into heavy urbanization.

As we see the increasing urbanization in southern Ontario, there is a need to have some levels of planning. I remember being told in school that some of the best class 1 farmlands in the entire country could be seen from the CN Tower. Much of that has been paved over and turned into condo development. Therefore, I would like to ask my hon. colleague this. What lessons can we learn from the issue of the Rouge and the importance of the Rouge River in terms of parkland, in terms of maintaining viable agriculture and viable wildlife space within the increasing urbanization of southern Ontario?

[Combatting Counterfeit Products Act, October 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, when my colleagues and I were working on the Copyright Act, one of the issues was that the only thing brought forward by the Conservatives was digital locks. Digital locks will not create a market. Digital locks will not stop theft. Any kid who wakes up in the morning probably breaks three digital locks.

What we said was, rather than simply saying that we would put in all kinds of legal provisions for digital locks, let us find a monetization formula. It does exist. This is not rocket science. It has been done before. It is possible.

The focus for the New Democrats is to say that our artists have a right to be paid and a right to be protected. We are not going to go the route of the Liberals, which was to criminalize consumers, because young people share. Sometimes they share movies, whether it is right or wrong, and we could debate that all day. Going after families and taking them to court for millions and millions of dollars, which we saw happening in the United States, is a wrong-headed move. In the States, it undermined the market and kids just walked away from it.

How do we establish that balance? It is not by criminalizing consumers but by finding the monetary stream to protect our artists.

[Combatting Counterfeit Products Act, October 2nd, 2014]

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.

[Combatting Counterfeit Products Act, October 2nd, 2014]

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.