Archive for April 8th, 2022

Fortune Global Forum 2018 #27 by John Lehmann/Fortune  FORTUNE Global Forum (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/2c3SF2A

Chrystia Freeland’s Hidden Tax: How Canada Should Implement the Copyright Term Extension Buried in Budget 2022

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled Budget 2022 yesterday. While much of the focus was on housing and the environment, buried in Annex 3 at page 274 was a promise to extend the term of copyright from the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. The extension fulfills a commitment in the Canada-US-Mexico Trade Agreement with the specific implementation details presumably to come in several weeks in the Budget Implementation Act. This is both a terrible policy making approach (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015 in part on a pledge not to use the budget to sneak through legislation this way) and terrible policy that experts have termed a “tax on consumers”. Indeed, term extension was long opposed by successive Canadian governments both Liberal and Conservative for good reason: it creates significant costs with limited to no benefits.

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April 8, 2022 8 comments News