Buying Books in Canada

Once unfair regulations driving up book prices in Canada are removed, booksellers and publishers can work together to create a better supply chain.

As vice-president of Canadian Booksellers Association, I, along with two fellow CBA board members, met with Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago. The meeting was requested when Amazon solicited permission to set up a warehouse in Canada.

So when you’re meeting with the heritage minister about a decision that’s already been made (Amazon was given the green light prior to this meeting), do you focus on the non-changeable past, or perhaps look to the future? We decided to figure out changes that would help our members – changes that were not only positive, but possible.

These two criteria were about trying to create a level playing field within the bookselling landscape in Canada. One request was for an open and accessible book rate (a reduced rate for shipping books), because while special book rates seem to be available via negotiations through large corporations, they’re not available to the hundreds of CBA members operating independently in communities across Canada.

However, the request that has received the most attention was the one asking to repeal the 1999 Copyright Act amendment related to book importation regulations, which essentially allow for a book being imported from the U.S. by the authorized Canadian distributor to be priced at the current exchange rate plus 10 per cent.

Chris Tabor, Queen’s Campus Bookstore director, president of Canadian Campus Retail Associates, a group representing Canadian campus stores, and an outspoken critic of the regulations since 1999, told the House of Commons the regulations were “treated as cultural protection steps when they actually constituted commercial regulation. It was flawed public policy then; it is flawed public policy now.”

“This private tariff has resulted in millions collected from Canadian students by private interests,” he later told me. “The policy regime requires no reporting by exclusive distributors and imposes no methods to measure the benefit to Canadian authors or cultural protection in exchange for the private tariff.”

Naturally, this shift in approach by CBA seems to work against the association’s strong belief that Canadian culture should be protected. But while it’s advocating for repealing the regulations, it’s not saying it wants to bypass the Canadian distribution channel. Canadian booksellers are passionate about buying Canadian; they want to support the dynamic distribution system within our country. But they want it to be fair and equitable.

In an open letter to book news and reviews magazine Quill & Quire, Toronto bookseller Ben McNally opposed CBA’s position, saying the Canadian book business is “small and fragile” and that “the only way it can hope to survive is for all parties in it to recognize that we are in a partnership.”

While McNally’s statement seems to oppose what CBA is attempting, the viewpoints have more in common than it would at first seem. Regarding the discussions with Minister Moore, CBA president Stephen Cribar says it’s a different retail world now, with any product and price imaginable at your fingertips, shipped right to your home.

“As booksellers we are not looking to shift our business through the U.S.,” Cribar said to me, “but rather for a way to bring book prices down in Canada now that customers can often get better prices from U.S. online retailers than the booksellers in Canada can even buy them for. We are passionate Canadians and want to use our Canadian distributors and publishers, but we also need to be able to compete in the pricing arena without giving everything away, or else we risk losing everything as consumers take their business across many borders.”

Tabor, a tireless advocate for students, told me with a hopeful smile, “Because the regulations do not require a change in the act and the tariff is not collected by government, with the stroke of a pen the current government can save students millions this September with no cost to the public purse and no cost to Canadian authors.”

The real discussions, the real partnerships that McNally speaks about and which CBA believes are possible, can happen after the removal of regulations that result in extra costs for consumers in Canada who want to support their community booksellers. At that point, booksellers and publishers can work together to ensure a stronger, smarter, and more commercially viable supply chain, dependent on solid business practices rather than on levies that do nothing more than drive the consumers themselves to buy books from foreign sources, hurting Canadian booksellers and the Canadian publishing community.