Thank you for that comment. Actually, before I got into law, I worked for heavy truck manufacturing in Woodstock, Ontario. We made parts for heavy trucks, for International Truck and Engine, in Chatham, which is no longer there, and Stirling, in St. Thomas, where the same sort of thing has happened. I worked on the shop floor as an engineer. I understand that these are great jobs.
The focus we need to have is this. Jobs are the success story of having great technology be ours. We don't own this intellectual property. We have a very small fraction of the freedom to operate. If you don't have the IP, you don't have the freedom to operate and so you're subject to the international players that have this IP. You don't have the control and you don't have the opportunity to keep the jobs where you want them. The recent report that I was referencing said that 58% of IP that's generated in Canada is now foreign owned.
This is what we do. We are creating all these great ideas, but because we don't own them, we don't have the opportunity to exploit them, control them, keep them in Canada to benefit...and to keep refuelling those jobs in future R and D. We don't have this freedom to operate. We don't have the IP. It's a constant struggle and we're just reinvesting in the end game of getting more jobs. What I would like to see more focus on is keeping the ownership of the technology, the IP that we're creating, and then we'll be able to keep refuelling with those manufacturing jobs as well. That's the first point.
The second point is that when we're getting into these trade agreements—you're thinking about NAFTA, you're thinking about TPP that's coming on again, and you're thinking about the China agreement that's being negotiated now, and CETA that's come along in the past—a lot of that is focused on our Canadian domestic IP rules.
As I said in my remarks, the Canadian IP rules are almost insignificant to Canadian companies. We're sitting here fighting about an insurance policy on a house that we don't own. We don't have any property and we're tweaking these things. Maybe there's a balance between the innovators and the users in Canada, but that's not helping Canadian innovators. Canadian innovators have to play by the international rules.
What do we do when we're going into those places? How can we get a better leg up when Canadians are trying to commercialize globally so we can retain the ownership for Canadian companies? That's one thing we've researched in the patent collective. You collect the critical mass of IP, patents. You create freedom to operate, buy up U.S. patents, and license them so the members are not subject to those patents. They have the freedom to operate under those patents as a collective. The collective will be able to benefit and won't have to take licences individually. They will have that freedom to operate, to go into the U.S. markets and exploit the technology there, and then bring that value back into Canada and refuel those jobs that you mentioned earlier.