Public Accounts committee  I would just like to thank the committee for their interest in this report. Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  Chair, can I respond? I think the difference is when we talk about the private sector retaining ownership, and that is on contracted activities, when government contracts with the private sector. When government itself, through its own employees, develops IP, then it will licen

Public Accounts committee  I really can't answer that, because it's not something--

Public Accounts committee  I think that depends on the scope of the activities. If you compare the NRC's activities with other departments, it is not such a significant part of their operations.

Public Accounts committee  We do not know.

Public Accounts committee  I think that the NRC is in a different position from the departments, because, for most departments, this is not a major part of their operations. However, we do note that some departments indicate in their action plan that they are going to set up an office to manage intellectua

Public Accounts committee  I can talk to the kinds of errors we found. I'll refer to paragraph 2.35 of our report. We looked at contracts that were purported to contain intellectual property, and we found contracts for acquisition of a vehicle, event planning, catering, medical services, and language tra

Public Accounts committee  We are not able to do that. We had to present the information in quite a general way, because, as you can imagine, several of these cases are before the courts. There are restrictions on publishing information on specific cases or out-of-court settlements. That is why we were no

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I seriously doubt that the information is published as such in the public accounts.

Public Accounts committee  I think one of the big issues, as was mentioned earlier, was the quality of the data. An evaluation was going to be done, but then it was realized that the data was inaccurate, to put it mildly. We looked at the data from 2006, and you will see in the report that a number of cont

Public Accounts committee  This is the first comprehensive audit that has been done of IP management.

Public Accounts committee  I would say yes. Our concern is that there needs to be management over intellectual property and management in these contracts. This is an issue that needs to be thought through up front, and the government needs to protect itself in this process.

Public Accounts committee  I believe this is the first time we've looked at IP specifically. It is an issue that has come up in previous audits, which is what provoked this audit. I know the question of IP came up when we did an audit in Agriculture in 1999.

Public Accounts committee  Chair, could I try to give some element of response? From what I understand from the policy, I think government recognizes that government itself is perhaps not the best to commercialize things. As was being explained earlier, many of these contracts don't say they are to develo

Public Accounts committee  In the contracts we looked at, there was not always a clause that outlined what would happen to intellectual property, which could mean that eventually there could be disputes with contracts.