Canada's writers need a functioning market, not endless promises

I’m a university professor. I taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia from 2005-2017. That is a rewarding, educational experience, and one that equips graduates with real life skills. They not only publish their own works, they also take the skills they’ve learned into many professional applications, working for presses large and small, print and broadcast media, and in other communications fields. In my courses, I often used the work of others: poems by Canadian authors both established and emerging, articles on elements of craft by literary scholars, and on the writing life by working authors. I assembled these course materials for distribution to my students, confident that the authors who held copyright would be paid, via a straightforward licensing process, every single time I used their work. I’m an author, as well. And I know the notion that authors will be fairly paid for educational use of their work is now a false one. Canada’s good-faith permission and payment structure for educational copying disappeared a decade ago, with clumsy and destructive changes to the Copyright Act enacted by federal lawmakers. Since then, authors in Canada have lost 80 per cent of their licensing income. Think about that number. While our inflation rate steadily grew by 27.6 per cent, Canada’s authors were forced to absorb an 80 per cent decline in crucial income. How is anyone expected to survive that kind of fiscal collapse? This loss of income has been devastating for the voices we most need, those we too rarely hear: our most vulnerable authors. Parents with young children, senior writers without the stamina for the second or third job to fund their writing time, new Canadians, writers whose disabilities require them to have additional supports: these are the voices who are being silenced. Author Rhea Tregebov is chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing. Handout photograph The already precarious writing and publishing sector is out $200-million and counting. Non-functioning copyright law has wrecked what was a functioning marketplace. This regressive, economy-damaging outcome has, incidentally, done nothing to lower the cost of education for Canadians. I’m also the chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, tasked with finding a solution to this mess. The Trudeau government promised to fix it, both at the last election in 2021, in the 2022 federal budget, and this year before Parliament in response to my union’s petition. But when we meet with our lawmakers in Ottawa, seeking timelines, all we get are excuses and endless delay. We’re told we “poisoned the well” by defending our rights and incomes in court. We’re told that after a decade of free copying, university culture is incapable of adapting to stronger protections for intellectual property rights. Universities do not hesitate to sue for protection of their own copyright, of course, but is respecting the rights of others too much to expect of them? I’m not a professional lobbyist. Maybe I just don’t understand how things work in Ottawa. It seems to me that when the government makes a promise, it had better step up and deliver on that promise. We’re not demanding anything out of the ordinary. Every progressive economy in the world requires licensed payment for educational copying. Simple, effective, affordable licence structures ensure both broad educational access and fair payment to authors. Canada is a shameful global outlier and, for many of our trading partners, an example of how not to treat cultural workers. The situation is both an international embarrassment, and a serious problem for existing treaties we signed decades ago. The bottom line is this: Canadians were promised repair of this ungainly mess. Will this government ever deliver it? Author Rhea Tregebov is chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing. The Hill Times

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Canada’s writers need a functioning market, not endless promises

While our inflation rate steadily grew by 27.6 per cent, Canada’s authors were forced to absorb an 80 per cent decline in crucial income. How is anyone expected to survive that kind of fiscal collapse?

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