Industry committee  I would first like to thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I've never done anything like this before, and I was pretty excited about doing it. Thank you for the invitation, and I thank my company for having designated me as the pinch-hitter for John Baker. I don't

Industry committee  We are looking at other geographies, such as Newfoundland, for example. One of the reasons we're going there is to try to help on the software side. It absolutely can be a challenge. I don't know what the answer is. Canada used to have an immigration program called the pilot pro

Industry committee  I would agree with Mr. Kee on that. We work closely with some of our local institutions. We have the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, and the University of Guelph. There have been discussions, but as I said, the first IP purchase that we're undergoing is with a U.S. clie

Industry committee  Yes. They were a client, and they really liked what we were doing. They said that they had developed this idea and how would we like to commercialize it for them.

Industry committee  Software development is probably the single biggest one, and project management. It's along those lines. We have openings from executive assistants to senior marketing people, but I would say that software development is the biggest one.

Industry committee  Well, there's quite a bit of pressure in the K-W area because it is so tech heavy. We really like hiring new graduates, so we go to the local universities to try to get new folks. Communitech has an initiative to try to bring back people from Silicon Valley and other places. We

Industry committee  I'm not a tax accountant, either. I'm not a patent lawyer.

Industry committee  I would think it may have an effect. I know that we rely on credits for helping our company grow.

Industry committee  In a perfect world, the United States and all the countries would have a more harmonized system. It is expensive for a company like ours to try to stay abreast of the differences between Brazil, the United States, Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand. It's very costly. There are

Industry committee  I think there are sufficient similarities between the U.S. and Canada in that you don't have, for example, the language issues that you have with Brazil or Colombia. To the best of my knowledge, we never sought the assistance of the Canadian embassy in the U.S. We will, from ti

Industry committee  My response would be very short: encourage universities to tech-transfer to companies like ours at a reasonable price.

Industry committee  I'm going to plead ignorance.

Industry committee  Again, I'm not sufficiently familiar with what changes you're talking about. Perhaps you could give some examples.

Industry committee  With that, I want to emphasize that I'm not a patent lawyer, so I'm not one of the rich guys on the block. We have not faced any stifling at this point with any regulatory regime that I can think of offhand in Canada, be it IP related or not, and we have not found that in the IP

Industry committee  Not really. We were not faced with piracy or the issues Mr. Kee is faced with. I think an IP office might be helpful in a variety of ways if it were given a broad mandate.