Industry committee  I don't know, to be honest with you. What I do know is that if we expand the scope of the bill, as some witnesses today and during other meetings have suggested, it's going to make it increasingly difficult. It's going to put additional administrative burdens on our border servic

Industry committee  I think that's excellent. I'm glad to hear the committee and my fellow witnesses' interest in making sure that the bill doesn't deal with parallel imports and grey market goods. My fear is that particular provisions, such as clauses 44.01, 44.11, and 44.12, don't actually make

Industry committee  Yes, there may be. I can undertake to provide some further analysis of that issue. I didn't have time to look at that before my testimony today, but I'd gladly undertake that. I notice there's an exception in proposed subsection 51.03(2) for the trademarks provisions. The tradema

Industry committee  And to be clear...not to avoid health and safety standards, or to avoid duties or taxes, all of those must be complied with.

Industry committee  It is my understanding that it is possible to detain goods that are being imported in parallel, particularly copyrighted goods that are made with the consent of the rights holder in another jurisdiction but are being imported into Canada to offer Canadians pricing parity—better,

Industry committee  I don't know that anybody really has a handle on the scope of this problem or, frankly, the problem of counterfeiting and pirated goods crossing borders in general, so I applaud the efforts of the organizations that my fellow witnesses represent to gather better data. To me, that

Industry committee  I was just going to respond to your question about the capacity of the CBSA to deal with this. I am deeply worried about their capacity in terms of skills, human resources training, and cost. The bill, particularly in respect of the copyright-related amendments, involves a lot

Industry committee  No, I think border officials should be empowered in the way that they are in this bill. But the personal use exception and in-transit exception are important exceptions to make the whole system workable, manageable, and cost-effective. It's not possible to do everything within th

Industry committee  I think that's right, but if you start changing the scope of the bill and adding additional responsibilities, like searching personal luggage or dealing with in-transit shipments, that's going to have cost implications and administrative implications, which I don't think have bee

Industry committee  I'm not sure about the particular territorial licensing arrangements in that example, but I do know it's very common for Canadian businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises and large businesses like Costco, to engage in parallel importation to offer consumers mor

Industry committee  I'm very sympathetic to the plight of trademark owners, but the fact is that any time you oppose any additional administrative obligations, there's going to be a cost. Somebody's going to pay for that—absolutely it should be the counterfeiter or the importer. In my reading of the

Industry committee  I think it's essential that we do all that we can to discourage counterfeit and pirated goods from crossing our border. It's a good thing that border services agents are going to have the power to enlist rights holders in the fight against counterfeiting. That's a well-intentione

Industry committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify before you on the important matters in Bill C-8, Combating Counterfeit Products Act. I would like to focus my comments to the committee today on only one issue in particular and that's the issue of parallel imports. The term “pa

Industry committee  I would just add, in that particular context, that one of the concerns is abuse of process when it happens. If you can deal with those concerns, that may lubricate the wheel and allow us to move forward on some of these recommendations. On other specific recommendations, the iss

Industry committee  I agree with Mr. Henderson on that point. It's innovation that we should be concerned about. IP is a means to innovation, but not the only one. The distinction in the literature—and there is a huge literature on innovation—is that innovation has market value and intellectual prop