Well, it's an extremely difficult thing to do, because it's a very involved area. With patents, certain things have to be done in order to ensure, as has been said here before, that the rights holder gets the rights commensurate with what they've actually created, so it's a difficult thing to actually reduce costs.
I think there has to be a taxpayer burden to some degree for this, but costs are not all that high, either. For $20,000 to $25,000, a truly inventive invention can be patented in Canada and the United States.