Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise today in the House to speak to our economic update.
I did not get a chance to ask my colleague who just spoke a question. I think she was a bit unfair to the connect to innovate program. We invested $500 million in Canada, and the CRTC will invest even more to create the backbone of the system.
True, there are some challenges with the maps, but the CRTC and the Minister of Innovation are always open to redrawing the maps to better connect Canadians.
We invested $100 million in Quebec, and I was there for a number of the announcements. I assure the member and the House that we are working on getting people connected, since this has become a necessity in our country.
I would like to take a moment with the time that I have to speak about some of the intellectual property provisions in the economic update, with the backdrop being that the government had to address yet another deficit from the previous government, which was the innovation deficit.
The previous government, under Harper, had not invested for 10 years in either basic research or in innovation. We had fallen behind our neighbours and competitors in a variety of different ways. We had previously been good at this.
We have now brought that back, with massive, historic investments, in both fundamental curiosity-based research, as well as investing in both people and technology in order to make Canada a world leader in a variety of different digital areas, the new economy, artificial intelligence and training people, from kids all the way to the elderly, upscaling and retraining, in order that we be positioned to take advantage of that.
All of this is framed by an IP strategy that we announced earlier in 2018. It really pushes Canadians and Canadian inventors to think about intellectual property as part of the way in which they monetize their investments. I know the minister is fond of saying, and he is right, that companies that think about intellectual property tend to be more profitable and do better. We certainly are trying to buttress that with an array of policies in the IP strategy, as well as in the fall economic statement.
First, I want to speak a little about notice and notice regime and the improvements we have made to that. It is an interesting Canadian invention, the notice and notice regime. One of my old colleagues, Daniel Gervais, who was at the University of Ottawa at the time and is now at the University of Amsterdam, came up with this. The idea is that Internet service providers should not be liable for copyright infringement going on the Internet when they are acting only as a conduit. This accords with our traditional underlying principle of net neutrality.
What we do is we allow copyright holders, right holders to point out to an Internet service provider that there has been an alleged infringement of copyright through its architecture. Then we ask the Internet service provider to act in a certain way in order to maintain an immunity from liability.
In the United States, the Americans reacted with something called notice and take down, in which a copyright holder would tell the Internet service provider that there had been an infringement. In order for the Internet service provider to maintain its immunity, it would simply take down the work.
This system was widely criticized in the United States because it was being abused. People were alleging copyright infringement in all sorts of cases, when perhaps there was not even copyright infringement at all. It led to a silencing or had a chilling effect on free speech, among other things.
Our Canadian response was quite a good one. When such an allegation would be made, we would ask the Internet service provider to first freeze the information, archive it, and then give notice to the person who had put up the content that some sort of infringement had happened. This then would allow for both the information to be preserved and for the copyright holder to pursue it in our court system, if he or she wanted to do that, a court system in which we have a great deal of confidence, and get to the right result without the abuse that happened in the notice and take down system.
What began to happen in Canada, and I saw this myself a number of times in my teachings, was that American rights holders, through American law firms, would often allege content infringement in Canada. They would then send a letter to those people telling them that they had infringed copyright and that they would be sued unless they paid x thousands of dollars by clicking on the link included. Sadly, a number of people did not realize this kind of claim was in contravention of Canadian law and they paid the money. This kind of trolling is what we are trying to prevent by standardizing the kinds of letters that are used in the notice and notice regime and by prohibiting any request for a monetary settlement in these letters.
We also heard from Internet service providers in Canada that it was difficult for them to maintain and archive all these various kinds of claims. Therefore, by standardizing the form, we also reduce the costs and increase the incentive for Canadian Internet service providers to comply with the system.
It is a good system. We are improving it by standardizing costs, making it more fair and preventing trolls from taking advantage of the system.
I am very proud of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and her team for having preserved the notice and notice regime in the renegotiation of the free trade agreement with Mexico and the United States. It is a strong Canadian addition to international copyright. I am pleased we have taken steps to improve it, based on the consultations we have had. These were widely shared among people and were widely agreed upon.
We are also making improvements to the patent regime, which again will help the innovative climate in Canada. We are allowing for experimentation on patents and not calling it patent infringement. It has been said that the patent system is a bargain whereby a person gets a monopoly for 20-odd years for an invention after having disclosed the secret of the invention publicly. Yes, it is true. We do not want people to infringe on the economic rights of the patent holder. However, it is not an infringement on the economic rights of the patent holder because it is not an absolute right for some other researcher to do experiments with the patent to develop another invention or improve an invention. We have recognized that in the statute.
Because licensing is such an important part of the patent regime, we have also protected licensees who licence a critical patent for their own processes and inventions, such that if the company falls into insolvency or bankruptcy or goes under creditor protection, the licensee will not lose the right to use that licence.
With respect to trademark, we are adding bad faith as a ground for opposition to trademarks. That too is something that accords overall with what we are trying to do.
I and other colleagues have spoken about a new college for patent and trademark agents to improve the quality of advice and service that is given. Again, this helps Canadian innovators.
Finally, we have brought in major improvements to the functioning of the Copyright Board, which plays such a critical role for both rights holders and users with respect to establishing rights and tariffs moving forward. If we can do that more quickly, more efficiently and in a substantively better way, it helps everyone.
