Finance committee  Thank you, Ms. Prégent. I am president of the Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture. We represent over 6,000 people working in the media, arts, culture and event planning sector, including theatre designers and festivals. These individuals have been hit hard

Finance committee  Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to speak to all committee members. I am going to give the floor to Sophie Prégent, who is my co-spokesperson and president of the Union des artistes.

Finance committee  The Government of Quebec used a different approach. It had already included all the criteria in the legislation, and there was no independent commission. In addition, to fall under the definition of general media, the media should, for example, regularly cover seven of the ten di

Finance committee  We have not thought about any particular mechanism. An appeal mechanism could be an interesting avenue. If an enterprise that believes it meets the objective criteria is denied a tax credit, it should have access to an appeal mechanism. However, we have not made any specific reco

Finance committee  In terms of transforming businesses into non-profit organizations, I would first say that philanthropy has its limits. A number of donors focus, most of the time, on the health, education and other sectors. Donations to the culture sector make up only a marginal portion, especial

Finance committee  From the outset, I would like to point out that the federation has never suggested that an independent entity, such as an independent committee, be used. From the beginning, we have said that the most important thing is to save the media first. It is good to criticize them, to de

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the Standing Committee on Finance, on behalf of the Fédération nationale des communications, or FNC, and its 6,000 members working in the media and cultural sectors in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to

Industry committee  That is certainly one way of going about it. It depends on the approach that governments take. Right now, there is not really any tax on the sale of the spectrum, and everything goes directly to the treasury. So it would be entirely possible to establish a new approach and to use

Industry committee  If reproduction and public communication rights were recognized in the Copyright Act and were applied, that would mean that digital platforms would have to pay royalties for copyrighted material. That does not necessarily mean exorbitant tariffs. The idea of creating a fund for

Industry committee  In the brief you submitted, let us talk about the exception for retrieval tools. Those include content aggregators such as Google, which provides access to content. Google does not simply refer people; it actually gives them access to content. Some companies or individuals even p

Industry committee  As to the $50 million, the Department of Canadian Heritage will certainly be facing some major challenges in terms of finding an independent organization to administer those funds, since that is not identified in the budget. Even that is a challenge, so I think Canadian Heritage

Industry committee  Indeed, internationally, it may be necessary for all countries to move in the same direction, but Google won't withdraw from all markets that see an injustice in the fact that it accumulates unreasonable profits to the detriment of those that provide the content of its site. This

Industry committee  This is somewhat related to what we say in our brief with respect to restricting the tracking tool exception. There is a distinction to be made. Some sites refer us to articles, but don't necessarily provide full access without the user paying an access fee. In addition, there ar

Industry committee  We haven't had a penny in terms of journalistic information. Until the last federal budget, the government did not subsidize, or barely subsidized, print media. On the television side, the production of entertainment programs is subsidized—we're talking about independent televisi

Industry committee  The Fédération nationale des communications has repeatedly taken a position that Canada's failure to impose its own sales taxes on digital purchases is an abdication of its fiscal sovereignty. So we are, without question, in favour of imposing sales taxes, as Quebec is doing and