Good morning, Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the committee.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear here on behalf of Dalhousie University. As you mentioned, my name is Erica Fraser, and I have the longest title in the world, manager of technology commercialization in engineering and sciences.
The industry liaison and innovation office is part of the research services office at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our role at Dalhousie is twofold: we do both industry liaison and outreach as well as technology transfer. In technology transfer ILI works with researchers at Dalhousie and our affiliated teaching hospitals to protect, manage, and commercialize intellectual property developed at the university. In its industry liaison role, the office develops and manages research and development collaborations between industry partners and the university, including the negotiation, protection, management, and licensing of any resulting IP.
I believe that in your meeting of May 17 you received a good description of the role of technology transfer offices in Canadian universities. As such, I would like to address three challenges that we face in maximizing the innovative impacts of university research under the current IP regime.
The first challenge is that at Dalhousie, as with most universities, there's an inherent tension between the goals of academia and the culture of publication and the need to patent inventions to maximize the innovative and economic productivity results from our research. This disconnect results in the need to submit patent applications very early and often in a rushed manner. This can result in patents of a lower quality, either due to rushed drafting or the fact that the technology is not sufficiently developed with as much supporting data as would normally be desirable. While U.S. provisional applications offer a method of putting protection in place prior to a publication that is relatively cheaper, although not inexpensive in absolute terms, and sometimes, but not always, more expeditious, there is no such method available for filing in Canada. As a result, our first filings are done almost exclusively in the U.S., and Canadian applications may or may not follow 12 or 30 months later in the case of a PCT national base application. This depends on the potential for commercial partners and their potential markets.
A second challenge faced by our office, as well as the SMEs with whom we work closely, is the limited availability of registered patent agents outside major centres such as Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Further, the legal fees associated with obtaining legal services through lawyers and patent agents from these centres are higher than legal fees in smaller centres. I would submit that if more patent agents are distributed across the country, accessibility would be improved. I believe that this happens in part because of a lack of awareness of both the possibility of becoming a patent agent as well as the process for becoming one, as well as the lack of local support and mentoring available to those attempting to become qualified patent agents. I also believe this can be ameliorated through outreach and education, perhaps by CIPO, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, to people with a technical background regarding the option of becoming a patent agent as well as the provision of support for those attempting to become qualified across Canada.
I would like to draw this committee's attention to the final challenge, the ability of universities to protect their patent portfolio. As our budgets are very tight and patent litigation is very expensive, it is a challenge to enforce our patent rights. As such, we would welcome alternate enforcement options that would expedite and reduce costs, such as, for example only, a specialty division of the Federal Court, as was referred to in one of your previous proceedings.
I believe all these issues boil down to the larger issue of accessibility to high-quality patent protection and enforcement. With this improved accessibility to the level of protection, universities and our private sector partners can gain the maximum economic benefits from our innovations.
Thank you.