Crown copyright: Will the third time be the charm?

Not all Canadians have felt the chill of unnecessary copyright controls over government works. But those who have are usually left shaking their heads, either in disbelief or disgust. Why do teachers need to ask, year after year, for permission to distribute the Canada Food Guide PDF to their students? Why does a professor need to ask permission to include a government table or chart in a journal article? Why can’t reporters openly share the results of access to information requests? Confusion about permissions and open licensing for government publications is also hampering the work of our country’s cultural memory organizations. Perpetual copyright terms for unpublished government records prevent archivists from digitizing and openly sharing government documents that are more than 100 years old. Librarians wait years for clarity around permissions before capturing government web content and digitizing older government publications. Meanwhile, the Government of Canada’s own web archive has been inaccessible to the public for more than 18 months. Making government information more accessible would strengthen democracy, but these efforts are impeded by outdated and unnecessary copyright controls. As a result, government information is lost from the public record. Amanda Wakaruk is the chair of the Crown Copyright Working Group, Copyright Committee at the Canadian Federation of Library Associations. Photograph courtesy of Jason Franson More than 1,000 people across all provinces and territories signed a parliamentary petition asking the Government of Canada to eliminate Crown copyright for government works made available to the public. That was in 2017, the year before the start of the last review of the Copyright Act. During the statutory review, dozens of people and organizations provided testimony and/or submitted briefs to the House Industry Committee, explaining how perpetual copyright and unnecessary copyright controls over government works negatively impacted their efforts to make Canadian content more accessible and impactful. The committee’s 2019 report included dissenting opinions from both the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party, demanding that Crown copyright be abolished. These efforts built on more than 30 years of academic and parliamentary critique of Canada’s outdated system of Crown copyright. Notably, former Justice Canada employee Barry Torno described Crown copyright as a “legislative monstrosity” and a Private Members Bill to abolish Crown copyright was tabled in 1993 by then Liberal MP Bob Kaplan, a lawyer who had previously served as the Solicitor General of Canada under former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. More recently, NDP MP Brian Masse tabled a similar bill, which managed to survive one change of Liberal government, in 2019, but was never passed. In that same year, the Supreme Court of Canada considered Crown copyright as part of a land survey case. The justices failed to agree about how to interpret the existing provision, which prompted law professor Jeremy de Beer to describe the decision as, “about as blunt as judges can be about the need for statutory reform.” Canadians have been waiting for that reform for decades. The Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA), along with eight other organizations representing a broad spectrum of the Canadian library and archival community, asked the government to review our Crown copyright regime in 2019. Recognizing the exacerbation of the issue due to COVID-19 (which presented even more delays in permissions, etc.), the CFLA then asked the government to immediately assign an internationally recognized open licence to all government publications, retroactively and by default for new publications. Such a licence would be more understandable and comprehensively applied than the current, piecemeal assignment of a relatively complicated and confusing open government licence. It’s time for the government to fix a problem that has persisted for too long and continues to have a corrosive effect on our information ecosystem. Although much more remains to be done, assigning a recognized Creative Commons licence to Crown publications, retroactively and by default, is an obvious first step. Not only would this enable the work of cultural memory organizations, it would also further the aims of the government’s own Open Government initiatives. This is the third consecutive Liberal government to be asked by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries to review and fix Crown copyright. Now is the time for the Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, and the President of the Treasury Board Mona Fortier, to work together to repair the democratic deficit caused by this unnecessary legal provision. Amanda Wakaruk is the chair of the Crown Copyright Working Group, Copyright Committee at the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, and the Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Alberta The Hill Times

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Crown copyright: Will the third time be the charm?

Librarians and archivists are asking the Liberal government to fix Crown copyright, after waiting for reform for decades.

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