November Achievements

Time for the monthly acknowledgement of PWAC member excellence.

The full Member Achievement Bulletin can be found at the following link:

November Achievements

and here are some highlights:

The New Brunswick Southwest (NBSW) chapter of PWAC took part in the first annual Kings County Word Day on Nov. 4 in Sussex, New Brunswick. The goal of the event was to make the local published authors more visible to the people in Kings County and to give them an opportunity to present their work through book displays and readings.



PWAC was well represented by several members from the NBSW chapter including (pictured left to right) chapter president Trudy Kelly Forsythe with chapter members Donna Spalding, Carmel Vivier, Dorothy Dearborn and Ross Mavis (image loaded through Flickr).

Toronto Member Noelle Boughton is excited to share her new spiritual biography of one of Canada's most beloved authors. Margaret Laurence: A Gift of Grace - A Spiritual Biography has been published by the Women's Press imprint of Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. Laurence died 20 years ago, but still offers writers and spiritual seekers critical lessons. Watch for Noelle's workshops and presentations to share those insights. She's been invited to speak at the Lakefield Literary Festival in July 2007.

Ottawa member Emily-Jane Hills Orford has published My Grandmother's Cane, a short story, in the new Ottawa literary magazine, The Voice. She has also published an article entitled The Sad Demise of Iqaluit's Igloo Cathedral in November's issue of Crosstalk. The article is a result of the author's recent visit to Iqaluit.

Prairies member Doreen Kerby has published an article on John Hus (1369-1415) in The Canadian Lutheran magazine. Hus was burned at the stake 65 years before Martin Luther was born. Says Doreen, "When I was in the Old Square in Prague, I was intrigued with the huge monument commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death. I was determined to write about this man."

Victoria member, Paula Wild has recently released The Comox Valley: Courtenay, Comox, Cumberland & Area (Harbour Publishing). The Comox Valley is a coffee table book chock full of photographs and information about the region. Color photographs combined with lively text capture the grandeur of the landscape, the flavor of the area’s distinctive communities and the larger than life characters who call this area home.

PWACers in the Times

Congratulations to Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau for an excellent review of their recent book, The Story of French, in the New York Times. That ought to sell a few copies.

From the review:

The authors, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, are bilingual Canadians with a sense of mission. They value French as a vehicle of expression uniting 175 million people scattered in a linguistic archipelago across several continents. They also see it as a counterweight to American political and cultural power. Unlike the French elite, which has “thrown in the towel on French,” they are spoiling for a fight.

Read the full article (may require registration) at:

The French Have a (Precise and Elegant) Word for It

... and thanks to PWAC's Quebec Regional Director, Bruce Wilson, who spotted the review while on business in Washington, D.C.

considered opinion

It has been a little over a month since the Supreme Court of Canada released their decision in the Heather Robertson v. Thomson Corp. appeal. Since that day, there has been a great deal of discussion among writers (and publishers) about the meaning of the decision and its implications for the industry going forward. PWAC recently participated in a roundtable discussion at the Ontario Bar Association on this topic, and as is so often the case in the world of copyright, we came away with the sense that the discussion is nowhere near finished.

To help in everyone's understanding of just what was and what wasn't decided on October 12th, we present the following considered analysis of the decision, written by Warren Sheffer of Hebb & Sheffer, a Toronto law firm deeply involved in copyright and the cultural industries. This report was originally written for copyright lawyer Lesley Ellen Harris' website and copyright newsletter, and is republished here with her kind permission. You can subscribe to Lesley Ellen Harris' newsletter at her website.

Among those of Mr. Sheffer's insights PWAC finds particularly interesting is this bit (emphasis ours):

Notably, the majority, which seems to have been ultimately determined by the swing vote of the Court’s newest judge, Justice Rothstein, did not adopt a utilitarian perspective on Canadian copyright law that the Court had early expressed in its seminal 2002 decision Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc. (In this case, artist Claude Théberge took exception to his art being chemically lifted off paper posters and transferred onto canvasses without permission, an act that the Court, by a slim 4-3 majority, found did not violate Théberge’s copyright). Accordingly, it would appear that the Supreme Court is not prepared to embrace fully a utilitarian approach to copyright law, or put differently, it does not appear that the Court will abandon or ignore the author’s right perspective on copyright espoused by the minority in Théberge. Where the latter perspective is generally more favourable to authors and artists and is rooted in the belief that copyright is granted to creators as a matter of natural justice...

Download the full report as a PDF below:

Writers' Rights Upheld

free press alert

For Immediate Release: November 30, 2006

PWAC Objects to Court Pressure on Writer

The Professional Writers Association of Canada joins with Canada’s other free press advocates in supporting Toronto writer and editor Derek Finkle in his fight to maintain journalistic integrity in the face of extreme pressure from the courts.

Mr. Finkle, the best-selling author of No Claim to Mercy, a book about the Robert Baltovich murder case, has been court-ordered to turn over his research notes and other materials relating to the book. These events follow closely the cases of two other Canadian writers, Juliett O’Neill and Bill Dunphy, both of whom were pressured to release confidential information.

“In our view,” says PWAC President Suzanne Boles, “prosecutors are attempting to use a writer’s good and professional work to build their case, and that is not how a free society expects their justice system to act. The principle of source confidentiality must be respected and protected, or our free press unravels.”

The Baltovich case is going to retrial after the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned an original conviction. Mr. Finkle has expressed his intention to fight the court order and to protect the confidentiality of his research work and sources. Such action by the courts places a ridiculously heavy cost burden on an individual writer, and is unnecessary where prosecutorial due diligence is performed.

“A writer working within an established principle of a separate and free press,” adds Executive Director John Degen, ”is being forced to choose between respecting the courts and protecting his very career. As a society, we should refuse to subject our journalists to such unfair pressure.”

PWAC, established in 1976, is the national organization representing 600 professional freelance writers and journalists in Canada.

More information:

Suzanne Boles, PWAC President
suzanne@writeconnection.org
(519) 680-1658

John Degen, Executive Director
jdegen@pwac.ca
(416) 504-1645

For a PDF version of this release, click the following link:

PWAC Press Release -- Nov. 30, 2006

citizen revolt

Last week, PWAC staff attended an Ontario Bar Association roundtable discussion concerning the recent Supreme Court decision in the Heather Robertson case. We were there to present the professional freelance writer perspective on the ruling -- we won the big question, and will keep winning despite ongoing challenges on our side of the industry.

One thing we heard repeated from the "other side" of the roundtable was the challenge newspapers foresee incorporating a growing "citizen journalism" into the traditional business model for paid content in newspapers. The suggestion seemed to be that professional writing might somehow be out of fashion anyway.

Citizen journalism, if it is indeed a growing concern for Canada's newspapers in their hunt for content, is not such a futuristic concept, nor has it proven it has a place beyond certain highly specialized niches. Reader's Digest has been publishing their citizen journal, Our Canada (Where readers share their stories) for a number of years now. Youtube and the explosion of blogs are often linked to a perceived rise in amateur reportage, though the quality of that content has yet to prove anywhere near stable or dependable in the way traditional media, say newspapers, might require it to be. And there's recent news that the model has spread to other media, notably television. This report is from The Guardian online (though the full story appears to be locked behind a subscriber wall):

The race to successfully commercialise user-generated content has accelerated again with the launch of Sumo.tv, a dedicated UGC TV channel going live across the UK from today.

Sumo.tv claims to be the world's first user-content TV channel and will run on Sky channel 146, offering a 24-hour mix of new submissions and classic cult content.

The programming is supplied by and targets 18- to 35-year-olds, much of it based around the fail-safe combination of Jackass-style slapstick, gory stunts and weird experiments.

On the other side of that particular roundtable, The New Criterion (America’s foremost voice of critical dissent in culture and the arts) is now running a series of ads for their publication, selling the worth of their product on the notion of professional, high quality writing. What a concept.

A staunch defender of the values of high culture, The New Criterion is also an articulate scourge of artistic mediocrity and intellectual mendacity wherever they are found: in the universities, the art galleries, the media, the concert halls, the theater, and elsewhere.

Note to TNC:

If you're looking for some artistic mediocrity and intellectual mendacity to scourge, maybe have a glance at Sumo.tv.

complicated enough for ya?

Clearly, copyright discussions won't be getting any easier the deeper we all dig into this important concept:

According to the New York Times, the creative team behind a hit Broadway show are suing two other productions of the same show, claiming copyright over the creative decisions they made in putting their own production together. In effect, they are claiming the other productions are copying the original, not just by using the same script (the use of which is legally licensed), but by using other creative elements (set design, directorial choices, etc.) without permission.

"The Broadway creative team is demanding, among other things, that the teams for both the Chicago and Akron productions provide a detailed accounting of all their revenues, from which “an appropriate license fee and damages” would be determined. The letter to the Chicago production also demands that [the choreographer of one of the newer shows] formally return any awards he won for his work on the show."

Stories like this illustrate just how slippery a concept intellectual property can be, and also just how much necessary value is placed on this property in traditional creator communities. Under the "value added" model of derivative creativity are there no necessary limits? What if the derivative work, (a new production of a Broadway show, for instance) does not actually add any value to the original product? If a choreographer makes no creative contribution to an established show, does s/he deserve a career enhancing award for the work?

Mag Awards

If you have written for a Canadian magazine in the past year, please be reminded of the 30th Anniversary National Magazine Awards call for submissions, which opens December 1, 2006 and ends January 10, 2007. The 30th Anniversary Awards Gala will be hosted on June 15, 2007 at the Carlu in Toronto.

The submission process, instructions and guidelines, a list of categories, and other relevant information are available at the NMA website.

PWAC members are always in the list of finalists for these awards. Make sure you ask your assigning editor to submit your work for the NMAs, and good luck!

CMG Steps Up

Any PWAC member who has done freelance work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) this past year will have recently received a pamphlet from the Canadian Media Guild entitled "Taking the Free out of Freelancer." Accompanying the pamphlet is a letter from Don Genova, president of the CMG's Freelance Branch. The Freelance Branch represents anyone who has signed a freelance specific services contract with the CBC.

Like the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), a "national local" of the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP), the CMG's Freelance Branch is organized labour's response to the writing on the wall in Canadian media. As a higher percentage of media work is contracted to freelancers, we need to be recognized by organized labour as an important ally in the struggle for workers' rights.

The pamphlet contains some inspiring advice, such as:

Show me the Money! As an experienced freelancer, avoid working for the minimum rates wherever possible. Your fee should reflect your experience and expertise. Remember: a staff reporter with five years of experience would never work for the salary of a rookie. You shouldn't either.

It's Your Work: As a Freelance Contributor, you own the copyright to your work. It is your intellectual property -- guard it with your life! If you choose to assign or sell your copyright, ensure you receive significant compensation.

For more information about the CMG's Freelance Branch, please see their website

For information on the CFU, please see their site.