The group has been together for a while, as was pointed out. Part of the issue at the beginning was that there wasn't a group; rather, everyone had a piece of the pie, so to speak, in terms of addressing intellectual property rights protection, whether it was through the legal regime, the enforcement aspect, or the international cooperation aspect. No one was really coordinating it or assuring that the lines of communication with all of the involved parties were there.
The interdepartmental group started out, basically, with trying to figure out what the problems or challenges were with Canada's regime. The regime has been working; we do protect intellectual property rights, and we allow the rights holders to enforce those through our legal regime. There are certain gaps, but things have moved forward.
It was to identify both what was happening domestically--so we needed everyone involved domestically--and also to bring in the international dimension of what was happening outside Canada in other countries and other partner countries. We wanted to know how they were addressing the challenges and how we could amend our regime suitably so that we could address it in a consistent way with our international obligations, but also with the cooperation that's already in existence. That is becoming more and more developed as these things progress, because now it is recognized internationally that this is not a problem that can be addressed within one country.