Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Astle, and I'm a member and past president of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, or IPIC. I am a patent agent, a trademark agent, and a lawyer, and as such, I work as intellectual property counsel at Pratt & Whitney Canada in Longueuil. With me is Michel Gérin. He was our executive director for 14 years, and he is now an adviser to IPIC and an honorary member of the institute.
IPIC is the professional association of patent agents, trademark agents, and lawyers practising in all areas of IP law. Our membership totals over 1,700 individuals from across the country, and we have been supporting innovation for 90 years.
I want to thank the committee for inviting IPIC to appear today. We will be making some recommendations to help ensure that Canada's IP system functions well, is competitive, and supports the manufacturing sector.
Before we go further, I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to speak about an important improvement to the IP system that came into force in June. The Patent Act and the Trade-marks Act now include sections that protect confidential communications between clients and their patent and trademark agents from disclosure in court by a privilege akin to solicitor-client privilege. These enactments bring Canada's laws into line with other jurisdictions and will promote full, free, and frank communications between manufacturers and their innovation professionals.
Although I'm not speaking on behalf of Pratt & Whitney, I will say that our company and other innovators had sought these amendments. Congratulations to the previous government for putting the legislation forward, to the current government for ensuring that it came into force, and to the officials at Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada for their diligent work on this issue.
The natural progression to these changes is now to modernize the regulatory framework for patent and trademark agents. I will come back to that in a moment, but I will first ask Michel to speak about some other recommendations.