WIPO is a wonderful resource for academic technology transfer organizations, allowing a single patent application in the home language to be filed and retain rights in, as you mentioned, over 180 countries worldwide. That has been a great accelerator of protecting intellectual property that was developed in a particular country, be it Canada or the United States, and enabling more efficient protection of that invention in countries around the world.
On June 6th, 2017. See this statement in context.