Mr. Chairman, if we want to be an innovative country and to attract investment from around the world and encourage investment from Canada itself, we have to recognize that, to a very great extent, the currency in the global economy today is in fact intellectual property. It is every bit as valuable as any tangible property that businesses might have. We have allowed ourselves to fall legislatively behind other countries in the rest of the world. We have fallen behind in the international obligations that we've taken on, and we've become less attractive than other jurisdictions as a place to invest.
The government is undertaking an important initiative now with regard to copyright reform. This will be very helpful. For example, if you look at the production of video games in Canada, it's an industry that has tremendous potential and in which a good deal of work is being done with young Canadians to train them to operate in the field, including at the university I am chancellor of, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. There's tremendous potential there, but you want to make sure that when people develop intellectual property, they have protection and it isn't simply taken from them.
Similarly, we need to step up our activities in term of patent protection to ensure that entrepreneurs who invest very heavily in developing new technologies have better opportunities to get the return to pay back the investment they've made.
There's the whole area of counterfeit as well. We need to do a much better job in terms of manning the borders to stop people from bringing counterfeit products into Canada. Examples include everything from counterfeit heart medicine, which can literally put people's lives in jeopardy, to the brakes on your car, to jet aircraft parts. We need to be more vigilant and to arm and equip our border authorities with the authority they need to be able to make seizures of counterfeit and contraband coming into Canada.
So there's a range of areas where we can act. We have also had recommendations in Canada—and I know Mr. Morgan would be glad to elaborate on that as well, because it's very important to Research In Motion—to operate in the area of rights and rents and how we can make improvements in protecting innovative companies like Research In Motion.