Thank you.
One of the questions posed in the invitation to attend today was how intellectual property, or IP, is protected in Canada, and how it stacks up to other jurisdictions.
Intellectual property in Canada is primarily set out in four key federal statutes, and they are the Patent Act; the Copyright Act, amendments to which are included in Bill C-11, which is currently being examined by legislative committee; the Trade-marks Act; and the Industrial Design Act.
As a department, Industry Canada has both a policy and an administrative role in support of these frameworks. The department is responsible for providing policy advice to the Minister of Industry on these acts. It also houses the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which is responsible for the administration and processing of the greater part of intellectual property in Canada.
Of the various pieces of intellectual property legislation, the most pertinent to emerging transportation technology is the Patent Act. The core purpose of the Patent Act is to promote innovation and investment in Canada and foster competition, especially in new areas of technology. It does this by conferring an exclusive right to prevent others from making, using, selling, or importing an invention. This protection is available for any invention that is new, useful, and non-obvious.
Companies make use of patents to secure and protect a market space in which to exploit their inventions. These patents can also be used to gain revenues from licensing and sales, and, increasingly, to attract financing.
You have a chart that shows how our patent regime compares internationally with some of our key trading partners and in particular how we line up against the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia. As the chart shows, each of these peer jurisdictions has the same 20-year term of protection for patents. They all allow for the patenting of business methods. They all have some form of “early working” exception to allow others to use a patent prior to its expiry under certain circumstances, and they all allow for expedited reviews before the granting of a patent.
One area where the frameworks differ is that of computer software, which is not, generally speaking, patentable in Canada or the EU.
I would add that there are certainly indications that companies are making use of patents in Canada in some areas of emerging transportation technology. For example, according to data provided by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Canada ranks fourth in the world in patent filings in the area of fuel cells, behind Japan, the United States, and Germany.
To sum up, from an intellectual property perspective Canada's regime is competitive internationally and is being used by companies that are engaging in emerging technology development in the transportation sector.
Those are my remarks. I will turn to my colleagues from Transport Canada.