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Trump’s tariffs demand a response, but retaliatory tariffs have severe drawbacks. Canadians have inflation fatigue and while they are rightly furious at the president’s talk of annexation, their patience for higher prices on imported goods will surely wear thin. Given that Canada has spent the past 40 years reorienting its economy around exporting raw materials to the United States and importing finished goods back from America, a 25 percent tariff on US imports affects a giant portion of the goods Canadians purchase.

However, there is another policy response to tariffs, one that will substantially lower prices for Canadians, while incubating profitable, export-oriented Canadian tech firms, whose products can be sold by community-based small and medium enterprises, to the benefit of the Canadian news and culture industry, Canadian software firms, and Canadian consumers.

That response? Repealing Bill C-11, a 2012 law that prohibits Canadian firms from reverse-engineering digital “locks.” Bill C-11 is nominally a copyright law, but it’s more accurate to call it a lock law. C-11 is an “anticircumvention” measure, and it bans tampering with any technology that restricts access to a copyrighted work, even if no copyright infringement takes place.

Let’s unpack that some: I write books, and I sometimes go into a studio and record the audiobook, paying a director, a producer and an editor. The largest market for audiobooks in the world is Audible, a division of Amazon, which claims more than 90 percent of the market for science fiction novels.

Audible has a policy: every book it sells has to be encased in one of Amazon’s digital locks. Bill C-11 bans tampering with this lock, which means it’s illegal to make an audiobook player that can play back my books, unless Amazon gives you permission. It’s also illegal to make a tool to convert my audiobooks to another format,........

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