Thank you for inviting me to speak with the committee again. I offer my apologies for not being there in person with you today. I have been following the committee’s great work and will share some additional comments that build off the comments I made earlier, in June.
For those I have not met, I'm an IP lawyer, a patent agent and a trademark agent with Own Innovation. I'm a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, where I study innovation and intellectual property policy. I am also an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. I am appearing before the committee today as an individual.
It is clear that Canadian universities have had extensive ties with Chinese firms, as well as entities connected with the Chinese government and military. As we know, 50 Canadian universities have conducted extensive research with China's military since 2005, and Huawei has partnered with over 20 of Canada's research institutions.
While some Canadian universities have noted that they will not be working with Huawei in the future, many partnerships continue and are ongoing. In preparation for this meeting, I discovered that as recently as a few weeks ago, there have been new patent applications published, listing Huawei as owner, with Canadian university researchers as inventors, including people from the University of Toronto, UBC, Queen's, Ottawa, McMaster and Western. The filing dates for these patents go back to early 2022, which means that Canadian universities are still very actively building and transferring intellectual property to Huawei. This is despite ISED's “National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships”, which was published in 2021.
While patents are crucial for extracting economic value from research that may be published, that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not just patents: It's confidential information on new areas of study. It's data—genomic data, health data. It's algorithms, artificial intelligence and software, but the universities are not sharing the information on what exactly has been transferred or to whom.
I previously made three clear recommendations, and I will reiterate them here with additional context.
The first is transparency. We need to know who is working with Canadian research institutions and how much they have been benefiting. We really don't know the extent of the relationships or their impacts. This information needs to be made available on an ongoing basis, and with certain aspects shared with the public. Where is the accountability? Who is responsible?
The second is that we need to have proactive policies that mandate that universities must work with Canada's intelligence community to be up to date on the latest intelligence and understand challenges to proactively manage relationships for Canada's benefit. This is not just a shared responsibility of the federal and provincial governments; the universities themselves must want to be higher-performing, not just to appease public funders but for their own relevance within the country.
The current construct to guide change, a working group of universities and the federal government, is fatally flawed. It is insular. It fails to include domain experts who understand IP, national security, data sovereignty and privacy, to name a few. In addition, the university and government working group does not include innovative Canadian firms. If we create policies that manage only the needs of government and the universities themselves, we can’t expect that the innovative Canadian firms that actually commercialize technologies will be able to drive the economic value of this research for Canada.
Finally, we must retain strategic Canadian intellectual property and data assets. I said in June of this year that we must stop doing these terrible deals to make sure we don't get into the same problem again, but from what I've seen so far, it hasn't been having the necessary impact.
I look forward to continuing the discussion.