Charlie Angus

[Aboriginal Affairs, November 30th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, a state of emergency was declared in Attawapiskat a month ago. The situation is very serious. The Red Cross disaster relief team is on the ground now. But we want to know where the federal government's plan is. The government must work with the community to find a long-term solution.

Will the government declare a state of emergency and assist the people in distress in Attawapiskat?

[Business of Supply, November 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, one thing that has been very concerning since the Conservative majority came to power is the realization that our parliamentary system, which is built on the Westminster model, has always been based on a sense of understanding of the greater role of parliamentarians and that there is a lesser role for the crass partisan attack message box politics. However, that has been flipped in the government. We hear again and again that democracy is the fact that the Conservatives have won the election, so why does Parliament get in their way.

That is a very disturbing concept because it is a direct attack on the parliamentary tradition. Democracy is the system that was set up so constituents would send their members here to debate the issues of the day. That is my right and obligation as a parliamentarian.

Does my hon. colleague think that time allocation is actually part of a larger pattern of contempt for the traditions and the importance of the parliamentary system in our country on the part of the Conservative government?

[Aboriginal Affairs, November 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, Attawapiskat is a community that has tried to do things right and yet it has continued to fall behind from chronic underfunding and systemic negligence in terms of infrastructure, education, housing and health. The situation is causing an international outcry and Canadians are rightly wondering how this can happen in a country as rich as Canada.

Will the government commit to take the lead with eight officials and with the community to fix the situation in Attawapiskat so that we can return to the community to the kind of dignity that these people deserve?

[Aboriginal Affairs, November 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the Attawapiskat First Nation declared a state of emergency four weeks ago. Families are living in tents, in shacks and in trailers. People are in danger because of cold temperatures, yet no federal official has bothered going to see the community.

Yesterday, the government promised $2 million in assistance. Can the government confirm this and does it have a long-term plan to improve the situation in Attawapiskat?

[G8 Summit, November 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives were elected on a promise to clean up Ottawa. Instead, the Muskoka minister gets his hands on a $50 million slush fund. He runs the program through his constituency office. He hides the documents from the Auditor General. Then, when he is pressed for an explanation by committee, he claims that he had no role in the review of the projects. Two hundred and forty-two projects magically became 32. That is simply not true.

We have his letters of rejection to the municipalities. He said in the House that he handed all of the documents to the Auditor General. That is not true. The Auditor General told committee that she was given only a few unrelated documents.

Where is the outrage from Conservative backbenchers on behalf of Canadian taxpayers? Why are they sitting on their hands? Those Conservatives came to Ottawa to change Ottawa, but instead Ottawa changed them. They are now worse than the party they replaced.

[Copyright Modernization Act, November 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question, because this is not a technologically neutral bill.

As my hon. colleague said, the bill says that the TPM defines the right. This is going to have an extreme effect on education and libraries. Right now, if people want to get a master's thesis from the University of York and read it in Alberta, they contact the university which mails them a copy. They can read it for a while and then send it back. It is pretty easy to make a photocopy. It would not do any real damage. It happens.

The bill would force all libraries to put digital lock codes on the transmission of materials, so that after, I think it is, five days of study it magically goes poof and disappears. The ability of libraries to impose that kind of technology on the products they have, that are meant to be shared and understood, is excessive. I do not think it is even possible for them to be able to do.

It is going to have a negative impact. It is actually not serving anybody's purposes by having this arbitrary use of TPMs.

[Copyright Modernization Act, November 24th, 2011]

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.

[Copyright Modernization Act, November 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise yet again today on Bill C-11, an act to amend the copyright act.

As someone who has spent many years involved in the artistic and publishing business, I understand the vital importance of copyright for artists. There is an enormous amount of effort for an artist to create a work. As well, there is a great intellectual effort.

Copyright is a public construct. I love the way it comes down to us in French law, le droit d'auteur, the right of the author. This is a principle that has been fought over for hundreds of years.

As has been defined in parliamentary tradition, when an artist creates a work, it is not a piece of property. This is sometimes misunderstood by some creators. It is not a piece of property, something one can put a fence around, because we do not want to create fences around ideas; when we create a piece of artistic work, we want to open it up to the public. We want the public to be able to access that work. The problem occurs when artists are unable to receive rightful recompense for their work.

In 18th century England there were the so-called book wars. People would make copies of works, and then the book owners would keep out new competition.

We need to have a balance, and this has always been the issue with copyright. There is a need to ensure that a work can be put into the public realm and become part of our consciousness, our literature, our identity, so that new authors or new artists can build on that work and create more. We do not want to lock that content down so that it is inaccessible. However, in order for the creative process to continue, the artist must be paid.

Let us see how that relates to Bill C-11.

Unfortunately, in Bill C-11 we see a number of areas in which content is being locked down. It is being locked down as a so-called market solution. We hear the government say that we should let the market decide what copyright is or what rights the author and consumer have. That is not good enough. That is not forward-looking copyright. That is not copyright that would bring us into the 21st century.

We need to establish the principle that Parliament, not the marketplace, decides what the balance is. The marketplace has its role, but a corporate entity in the United States, such as Sony Music or another massive entertainment industry, does not have the right to trump the rights that have been established under Canadian parliamentary tradition.

Let us examine what those rights are.

Under the bill there would be the right to do parody and satire, which is a fundamental of art. All artists have done parody and satire of other artists. Today's great artist was yesterday's thief. Parody and satire are important. The documentary film community wants to be able to access work so that they can comment on it and create new works, but if a digital lock is put on it, those rights disappear.

With one hand we are offering rights to the Canadian public, meaning the right to make backup copies and the right to do parody and satire, but with the other hand we are taking those rights away if a digital lock is imposed, because a digital lock supersedes all other rights. That is not consistent with what many of our trading partners have decided.

There is a possibility to have a balance on digital locks, so let us examine their role.

A digital lock in a modern age is an electronic code to keep a product from being unfairly taken, and a corporate entity has a right to put a lock on their product. For example, in the gaming industry, codes were being broken on video games. People were taking the games without paying. The New Democratic Party has always supported the right of an entity that has invested in its creative work to put a digital lock on it.

However, in most of our WIPO-compliant countries, there is a right for exceptions. For example, someone may have to break a digital lock if that person is partially blind and needs to access a work to read it in larger print. That person is not the same as a criminal. In fact, it is a perfectly okay thing to do.

Another example is that because of digital locks, television networks will no longer be allowed to excerpt footage of films. They will only be able to show a screen. That does not do anyone any good.

There are legitimate reasons to be able to break a lock in order to access something someone has a right to. However, we do not support breaking digital locks just so product can be taken without paying.

On the issue of education, there are a number of areas where we have grave concerns. We support the idea of updating copyright into the 21st century, but we have concerns on the issue of fair dealing for education.

Fair dealing has been defined by right under the Supreme Court CCH decision, which established the six principles of what constitutes fair dealing. Fair dealing should not be seen as an open season to make it fair to take a textbook and just make endless copies to avoid buying more textbooks. That is not considered fair. The Supreme Court established the six principles of fair dealing so that we could have some clarity. We do not have that clarity in this bill, and it is important that we ensure clarity on education.

We also do not even define what education is. I can imagine many private businesses saying they are doing company training and saying it is education. That is not necessarily the same thing as education through an educational institution.

One of our great concerns in terms of education is the digital book-burning provision. If someone is learning through a distance education college, and many of my communities take education by long distance, students will be forced to destroy their class notes 30 days after the end of the semester, and teachers will be ordered to destroy their entire class notes. That would create a two-tier system of education, one in the classroom and one by distance. That makes no sense, and it would undermine the incredible ability of distance education.

To conclude, we are opposed to this bill because we do not see the government willing to work with us on the key amendments needed to make this bill into proper and positive copyright legislation for the 21st century.

[Points of Order, November 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. colleague is concerned that the term that the member was acting like a “grumpy old man” was somehow to be inferred as a complete insult to senior citizens across this country. People back home would think this is like the bully who suddenly gets challenged.

If we are going to talk about legitimate points of order, we should be following basic parliamentary procedures, not “he called me that” or “she called me this”, especially when we see the kind of ridicule that comes off the government benches on a daily basis.

I would urge you, Mr. Speaker, to be mindful of the larger role of parliamentary democracy and not be taken in by these attempts to rewrite the public record as being malicious attempts to undermine everything that is good in this country just because we are doing our job of challenging ministers who are refusing to answer questions.

[Points of Order, November 24th, 2011]

This is a point of order.