Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to all our witnesses for joining us today. We appreciate your taking time from your busy schedules.
For those of you who have had an opportunity to take a look at what we've been doing in this study, it's a study that we take very seriously, obviously, and it's one I believe is very important to the future of this country.
To set the stage for today's questions, Dr. Meulien and Madame Nolet, could you talk a bit about Canada specifically?
I read a lot early in the discussions, and the testimony from witnesses has been that Canada is the second place of registration for patents. I got the impression early on that from an IP development perspective, we aren't a leader, although I've heard a lot of testimony over the past month or so that maybe we're better than we've given ourselves credit for.
Could you talk to the baseline of where Canada sits globally today? We want to take patents and IP to commercialization, and obviously, Dr. Meulien, we're going beyond that now, but let's just start with taking it to commercialization.
How does Canada fare globally, and are there hurdles? As well, are we doing things right that we should be acknowledging as we complete our report?