Canada fought hard to exempt the cultural industries in the recent renegotiation of NAFTA, now the USMCA. Prime Minister Trudeau said that waiving the exemption for cultural industries would be tantamount to giving up Canadian sovereignty and identity.

The exemption preserves and supports Canada's diverse cultural voices. It is key to the continued health of our creative industry, but we are in significant danger of a backdoor gutting of the cultural exemption in the film and television industry. If global digital behemoths like Apple, Google, Netflix and others are allowed to continue to broadcast in Canada in a totally unregulated manner, then our fight to maintain the cultural exemption and the jobs of creators and broadcasters of cultural content will have been for naught.

As Erin noted, we are now at a crossroads, a time when legislation and regulation either matter, or they don't. If we follow one fork in the road, we can continue to be part of the upward momentum of the domestic industry, and digital platforms and distribution channels, both foreign and domestic, can contribute to building a healthy domestic industry. If we follow the other fork in the road and fail to act, we essentially throw up our hands to foreign content and foreign platforms and capitulate to the behemoths lurking just over the border.

I'd like to turn back to an issue that was raised by our friend Neal just now, namely their quest to have the screenwriter and/or the director named as the author of a television show or film. For practical purposes, there is no question. For decades, the producer has been treated as the author throughout the Canadian and, importantly, United States industries. Fair rights and equitable remuneration for writers and directors have been successfully settled over those same decades through the extensive negotiation of industry-wide union and guild agreements by all industry participants.

Television and filmmaking are collaborate endeavours. Producers bring together all the creative elements to get a project from concept to screen. We hire and work closely with all the key creative roles. We work with the screenwriters—we love the screenwriters—to turn ideas into scripts. We hire directors, whom we equally love, to help turn scripts into projects. We also love and work with the actors. Who can imagine a show without the actors and their creative input? We hire the production designers who make the sets, the wardrobe designers, the composers and the musicians. Who can imagine a show without music? It's vital. We work with editors and crews, among many others, to shape the project and bring our collective vision to the screen.

Screenwriters, directors, and all the other contributors are important partners of producers, and we value all those relationships tremendously. After all, television programs and feature films are the ultimate collective works.

I'll put this in context. As you know, I produce Degrassi. We have now delivered 525 episodes over nearly 40 years. The most recent four seasons have been licensed originally to Netflix, where they're seen in 237 territories, in 17 different languages. It has been a success story.

To suggest that, for example, a screenwriter we hired to write episode 487, long after the characters, settings, formats, scenes, plot, storylines and music have already been in place for years and years, ought to be considered the author of that episode is simply wrong. However talented that screenwriter may be, she is working off a foundation—an ongoing foundation—and creative expression that has been built up over many years by many different contributors.

A producer's copyright is the foundation for all private and public funding sources for film and television projects in this country and in the United States. Authorship and ownership of copyright in the cinematographic work is what allows the producer to commercialize the intellectual property. Ultimately, we cannot do our jobs as producers if we are not considered, as we are today, authors of the cinematographic work.

Thank you, all, for this opportunity to discuss these issues with the committee.

Erin and I would be very pleased to answer any questions you may have.

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