Canada’s writers emerge from pandemic poorer and with fewer rights

Unless you’re the billionaire owner of an online retail site, chances are you suffered during the last two years. Even those who were lucky enough to have and keep a full-time job during the pandemic could not escape the dramatic toll on mental health that came with the isolation, increased stress, and incessant worry. Now we’re watching with cautious optimism the very beginning of what we hope is the great re-opening. We’ve downloaded our vaccine passports and are thinking seriously about restaurants and airports again. Hockey arenas are full of double-vaxxed players and fans. Dare we begin to worry less about our health- and front-line workers? It’s all a bit surreal, but certainly welcome. We have reason to hope that the lives we put on hold in early 2020 will regain most if not all of what was lost. But that is not the case for workers in one of the most vulnerable segments of our economy. Artists, those who labor to create the cultural works we all turned to during lockdown, have been uniquely damaged in these last months, and not just by the pandemic. Rhea Tregebov is a novelist, poet, and associate professor emerita of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Photograph courtesy of The Writers’ Union of Canada/Yaz Strang I work in writing and publishing, and while for some of us, lockdown meant more time to write and fewer distractions, the pandemic did inevitably, and across the board, result in less income. And as an industry overall, we are hurting. While book sales have begun to recover after a sharp lockdown decline, we’re looking at a future in which optimism seems foolish. Not only did the pandemic shut our bookshops and libraries, disrupt our publishing and promotion cycles, and wreak havoc on our supply chain, it brought into crisp focus a glaring irony of this trade. We make something of great value, but painfully little of that value returns to us as income. Being a cultural worker has never been easy. We all know the stale trope of the starving artist, but it exists with good reason—economic comfort and security are difficult to come by in this largely gig economy. However difficult it is, there should at least be the possibility of earning a living as a writer. But at present the fragile and complex economic structures that keep us going are looking less and less viable. Over the last 60 or so years, with help from arts funding and careful public policy, Canada has deliberately crafted a world-class domestic writing and publishing business. Recognition for Canadian literature is soaring globally. National treasure Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013. We just had Nation of Honour status at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest, most influential marketplace for global literature. We’re good at this. Why is it so damn hard to make a decent living? Well, it certainly doesn’t help that over the last 10 years neither our lawmakers nor our courts have been willing to protect artistic livelihoods. Canada’s writers and publishers have spent the last decade fighting for our rights before judges, policy-makers, and Parliament. It was exhaustive and exhausting. It was time we could have spent writing. We have with this effort identified deep flaws in the Copyright Act, and proven that those flaws are being exploited to take our labour and its product for free. We are seeing massive theft of intellectual property as a result. No one should be expected to work for free. But that’s been the experience of Canada’s authors as educational institutions across the country refuse to pay a reasonable license fee for copying our published writing. Teachers tell us our work is valuable enough to teach, but their administrations have become addicted to the cost-savings that come from free copying. Free copying remains illegal, even according to the flawed Copyright Act. But neither Parliament nor the courts have taken the necessary hard line required to remake the education sector as a paying customer. Just this summer, in the middle of a pandemically devastated economy, the Supreme Court of Canada gave schools a pass on something like $200-million in copyright payments owed, ignoring the overwhelming evidence accepted by the lower courts. That is money desperately needed by workers in an extremely precarious profession. Unjust and unwise. It’s now up to our fresh Parliament to make sure the courts and the pandemic have not collaborated to fatally weaken a literary culture that has given so much and gained so little. Rhea Tregebov is a novelist, poet, and associate professor emerita of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. The Hill Times

Canada’s writers emerge from pandemic poorer and with fewer rights

Free copying remains illegal, even according to the flawed Copyright Act. But neither Parliament nor the courts have taken the necessary hard line required to remake the education sector as a paying customer.

Falling through the cracks: why Canada’s music creators are being left behind by the Copyright Act