Industry committee  I don't think this bill covers that in itself. I think we need changes under privacy reform with Bill C-27 to also guarantee that. I do want to flag something in terms of the question of what a repair is. I think focusing on original functionality might be worth looking at, rather than the exact state that the manufacturer handed it off in.

Industry committee  Yes. To your point, people are going to make modifications to their devices no matter what we say here. Some of those people are going to be contravening the rules, but we're not stopping the most sophisticated users by denying basic repair rights. We're denying repair rights to ordinary law-abiding folks.

Industry committee  Absolutely, and unfortunately, some things that are happening to it right now are in our view a disaster for consumers. The extension of copyright from a default of 50 years to 70 is a really bad thing for ordinary people. It would be well past time for us to look at the act more generally and to see where it is or is not serving its purposes, because without a general interest lens on it, the act tends to be abused by companies to further and further disadvantage consumers.

Industry committee  That's exactly right. I think you need to look at the incentives here and what kind of system they produce. Our colleague, Ms. Lovrics here, is concerned about overly broad consumer rights that could be used outside of repair purposes. Maybe there's an opportunity to tighten a little bit of the language to be very clear that we're talking about repair here.

Industry committee  That's a huge question. I think in general I'll defer the interoperability discussion to both the Bill C-294 discussion and also looking at our Competition Act—and the privacy act, for that matter, in Bill C-27. The big picture around interoperability is that many, many digitally savvy companies are locking their consumers within walled gardens.

Industry committee  We're seeing a world in which physical devices don't work like we think physical devices should anymore, right? Folks from farmers to auto workers are speaking about this. There's a whole followership on the Internet about the Internet of things misfiring and people who buy a refrigerator, a fryer, a car—and even, honestly, soon clothing is coming—where you might just find that, “Oh, this manufacturer has gone belly-up”.

Industry committee  There hasn't been, to my knowledge. The Competition Bureau has a lot of limitations on its ability to do proactive studies under the current Competition Act, and we are separately advocating for them to have more power to be able to look at these broad consumer problems. They have a lot of trouble doing that currently.

Industry committee  A question people have been talking about here this morning is the broadness of this bill and the fact that it's a broad exemption, and I think that's a really important part of it. The reality of the situation is that manufacturers are finding a lot of different ways to throw obstacles in the way of consumers when we want to do this, so having a broad exception is a really important approach to having a broad right to act here.

Industry committee  Yes, there are certainly a lot of different use cases, some of which may raise safety concerns, as you mentioned. I think we are open to some modification of the text, just to further clarify some of the cases that could come up. To be clear, this is for repair purposes. It's to be clear that, potentially, for some categories of devices, repair needs to be done to a certain standard, like what you're talking about in emergency situations.

Industry committee  Maybe, I guess.... I don't think that's the primary barrier that most consumers are facing. In most cases, they're out of warranty when they're seeking repair, so I don't know that it's a major portion of this bill either way. I'm not sure. Other folks might have other views.

Industry committee  Good afternoon. I'm Matt Hatfield and I am the campaigns director of OpenMedia, a grassroots community of nearly 300,000 people in Canada who work together for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet. I am speaking to you from the unceded territory of the Stó꞉lō, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam nations.

Canadian Heritage committee  It makes it worse. We're making it more difficult to share good information, which means more bad information will spread. The bill shouldn't be set up that way.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. It's a minimum of 50% that comes from small grassroots donations. Google was a donor in our last financial year. They aren't in this one, but they have been before. We don't take more than 15% from anyone.

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't think anyone really knows how the determinations are going to be made around what the payments are based on. In terms of the spread of links and content and clicks, those appear to be the only criteria that are at all quantifiable in this bill. It's either that or vibes from the CRTC, just a sense that there must be an intangible amount of extra value being delivered in the text of the bill.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, absolutely. I think the challenge we're seeing is that the criteria set out focus on organizational features: having two journalists or a certain focus to your news. They don't seem to have any examination of the quality of what's being produced: “Are you making great journalism?