Access Copyright + Copibec: Their Offensive Budget Bluster

As an affiliate of Access Copyright, from whom I annually receive enough for a nice lunch for one or a rather modest lunch for two, I also get Access’s Updates. Here’s the latest from September 2025. Note this passage towards the end:

Access Copyright and Copibec Make Joint Submissions for Federal Pre-Budget Consultations

Access Copyright, in collaboration with Copibec, the reproduction rights organization for Quebec, participated in the pre-budget consultations undertaken by the Standing Committee on Finance and the Department of Finance in advance of the tabling of the 2025 federal budget this fall.

In both submissions, our organizations made four recommendations, reflecting the growing importance of implementing a regulatory framework for the fair and responsible development of Generative AI (GenAI) in Canada as well as the continuing need to repair the educational marketplace for published works.

Our recommendations are:

·        That compliance with the Copyright Act be an obligation of any normative framework concerning GenAI.

·        That no exceptions for text and data mining be introduced to the Copyright Act.

·        That transparency requirements for AI training be included in any normative framework concerning GenAI.

·        That the government amend the Copyright Act to clarify fair dealing for education, make tariffs set by the Copyright Board of Canada mandatory and enforceable, and ensure statutory damages are available to all collectives.

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These recommendations do not belong in a budget. Budgets are for important fiscal announcements that deal with financial issues affecting Canada as a whole. They are not for the purpose of hiding and deflecting attention from self-serving senseless lobbying efforts aimed at enriching narrow corporate interests and burying such initiatives deep in omnibus legislation where they can escape adequate parliamentary scrutiny.

Justin Trudeau shamefully resorted in 2022 – contrary to his explicit promise to the contrary – to using the budget process to hide bad copyright legislation amidst and omnibus legislation. See Oops! He Did It Again: Budget 2022 Hides Copyright Time Bomb By Throwing Parliamentary Scrutiny Under the Omnibus Bus. Trudeau caved then to the copyright content crowd.  Let us hope that PM Mark Carney will NOT repeat that shameful error in the budget expected on November 4^th, 2025. The unexpected, early, and regrettable departure of David Lametti as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister removes a potentially highly principled and expert source of wise advice.

The Access Copyright and Copibec proposal to make tariffs mandatory and enforceable with statutory damages is drastic, indefensible, and contrary to very longstanding legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Trying to sneak this into the budget process is indefensible and, indeed, extremely offensive. And I’m not using the word offensive in the strategic sense of aggressive but rather in the more fulsome sense of disgusting and deplorable.

HPK