If you look at the U.S. filings for last year's patent filings—they just came out yesterday for the top 300—you'll see that these companies are building enormous arsenals. Facebook's filings were up 78% last year. IBM filed another 10,000 patents. We're so mismatched by 20 years of not paying attention that the only way we can rebalance this is through collective actions.
Again, I draw to the story of western Canada. It was so imbalanced to the force of the U.S. a hundred years ago that communities came together and created collective strategies. We need the same for IP. We can talk all we want about supplying clean tech, but we own virtually no clean-tech technologies. We've funded them through our researchers and we've funded them through our granting programs, but they've all leaked out.
CanSino is another case in point. We're counting on the benevolence of China, a Chinese company and the Chinese military for our sovereign ability to look after our health in a vaccine. That's no way, I believe, for a country to manage its security, sovereignty, health and prosperity in the 21st century.