Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11)

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. parliamentary secretary a question. In contrast to his claim that opposition members are merely seeking to delay, I have put forward substantive amendments at report stage. They have been drawn from the testimony that has been placed.

As we heard earlier from the hon. House leader, there have been a lot of experts who have testified. The vast majority of experts who have looked at the digital lock provisions do not find them consistent, as the hon. parliamentary secretary suggested, with our trading partners, but in fact far more restrictive than is necessary to meet the rules of the WIPO convention.

I ask the hon. parliamentary secretary if he would not consider amendments to improve this legislation.

Gerald Keddy: Mr. Speaker, my understanding of the way the digital lock technology works is that it is there to protect the copyrighted material, to make sure it cannot be copied and it cannot be used by somebody for the wrong purposes.

It is not that we do not want to have a free and open society, but we do want to have rules-based trading, and we do want to catch up to the rest of our G8 country member trading partners.

Quite frankly, this argument reminds me a lot of an interesting statistic I am going to throw out, because I do believe that our artists and our creators and people who are investing in technology in this country can compete with anyone in the world. We heard this debate in the original free trade agreement with the United States, about Canadian wines. Canadian wines were a fledgling industry at that time. Today that industry is worth…