Good evening, Mr. Chair, committee members, fellow witnesses, and others watching. Thank you for taking the time to come out to the west coast. We appreciate it, especially on such a lovely day.
It's not often that I get to stand in front of MPs and lobby for the status quo. This is kind of exciting. I'm a poli-sci student from Capilano University in North Vancouver. I'm also the VP external at the student union there.
You said just come out and say it, so I'm going to come out with it. It is imperative that we keep fair dealing in the Copyright Act.
I can go through all my nuance and facts. I can also just speak from personal experience. I've had peers and classmates who go through and textbooks are continually quoted as one of the biggest barriers to education when I talk to folks. Removing fair dealing just adds a further barrier.
It's my role in student government and it's your role in the real government to reduce barriers to public sector education. Removing fair dealing just increases those barriers.
I've heard folks talk about the fact that this will lead to a reduction in Canadian content. There's a remarkably easy solution that prevents that. Open educational resources, OERs, are front-loaded textbooks, we'll call them. They're textbooks that are available for free to professors and to students, in a way that the government prefunds them. We pay in advance for the research. We send out tenders. B.C. recently had an $18-million open educational resources test pilot. That was absolutely incredible. It provides textbooks to professors and to students without actually putting the burden on them, while still creating that rich Canadian content.
A survey done recently in B.C. said that 30% of students actually got a lower grade in their classes because they couldn't afford their textbooks. I don't need to preach to you folks about how much more expensive education is getting. We can't increase, we can't keep adding that load onto students' backs.
In closing, we really do need to make sure Canadian institutions stay competitive. We need to make sure that folks are getting in the classrooms the most up-to-date information. We need to make sure that the schools stay affordable.
Thank you.