Thank you. It's great to be here at committee today.
Minister, thank you for being here. I know in the past we've talked about the fact that my community has a very large arts industry. I have a film studio district, and over this past summer I was talking with a lot of actors in my community, members of ACTRA, and writers who are members of Writers Guild. They've been watching what's happening in the United States with the strikes in the United States. In particular, one of the issues that have come up in those strikes has been about AI and the impact of AI on the arts industry, particularly with respect to the use of actors' voices or images and the use of materials written by writers who work for film and television.
One of the questions they were asking me was what we can do in Canada to make sure that we are creating the right protections for artists like actors and writers in the context of AI. They were actually very excited to see that we have this bill. They recognized that we are ahead of many countries in having this kind of legislation, but the question they wanted answered was what we could do specifically on the types of issues I just raised.