Sure. Thank you, sir, for the question.
There is no tension between those two things. You simply file provisionals for the patents when you're publishing. That's what other nations do. It's quite inexpensive. They do it in an organized, systematic, expert fashion. There is no problem doing that, but we just don't do it.
I'd like to quickly talk about open science.
We misconstrue open science, because you cannot make something open that you don't own. If you invent the time machine but you don't patent it, the person who creates the door handle for the time machine owns the time machine. If you invent the time machine and say, “Now I give that as open”, you have to own it before you can say it's open. Open science has a very active appropriation structure before you avail it.
In terms of the recommendations I made, they're very simple. You create collectives that have broad, upstream.... When you file the provisional, who does it and who manages its 10 years of filing? We have no system for doing that. We have no funding, we have no training and we have no institutional apparatus, and the rest of the world does.
All of my comments are around creating an expert zone that has the stewardship function, including the filing, the staying with it, the licensing and the education. The only thing I would encourage your committee to study very quickly is the data-driven economy and data trusts, and the interrelationship between IP, data, algorithms and all of that. I've given you some of the IP filings on algorithms.
Basically, all I'm saying is to take an organized, institutional approach to manage the appropriation and the education of the appropriation, and then I say also do that with data. This is very small money. It's an orientation.
I chaired a panel on this for the Government of Ontario. Every leading innovation economy has been doing this for decades.