International Trade committee  Everybody bends the rules in the innovation game. The innovation game is about rules to advance national prosperity. So everybody bends the rules dozens of times a day all over the place, all around the world. That's how the game is played.

International Trade committee  Sure they did.

International Trade committee  No. First of all, Nokia is a 100-plus-year-old company, and Nokia has all kinds of innovators in all kinds of places, as does Sweden. So the Scandinavians do very well. We could do very well to take a page out of their playbook. I'm not talking about one specific company; I'm tal

International Trade committee  I'm not saying me, I'm talking about the Canadian economy. I'd say my experience comes from this. In Canada we don't make many of these innovation outputs, that's why our performance is very low in those sectors like farming, oil, and so on. They are going to be increasingly more

International Trade committee  I'm not an expert on the automotive sector. There are people who know far more than I do, so I cannot comment on that with specificity, although that is something I believe is worth looking at because it's a very important part of our economy. I look at it through the lens of i

International Trade committee  I know some of those who are very high profile in it. What TPP does is enshrine the interests of pre-existing IP holders, and so it advantages those. The problem is that Canada really has none of those, and so Canada is a net loser. It creates inequity between states that have a

International Trade committee  As I am trying to say, many things matter in an innovation economy. The most important issue for a company is freedom to operate. It is a multi-faceted thing, where you expand your ability to own something that is created only abstractly by rules, and you restrict the other perso

International Trade committee  The way I read the administration provisions and the enforcement provisions of the IP, and the way I read the ISDS under the TPP, I can't see a case where we will win.

International Trade committee  Can I ask the question back? Has a single person who has testified before you ever commercialized Canadian ideas globally?

International Trade committee  I do—no.

International Trade committee  Corporations look at tax strategies, stable banking, and things like that. Definitely, they are factors for investment, for what I would call a “jobs strategy”. However, when it comes to getting money for Canadian ideas, that is called “innovation outputs”. There is a very big d

International Trade committee  I'm not saying who we should trade with, I'm saying what should be in our innovation strategies of approach and what should be in our trade agreements that advance our innovation strategies. From what I know of CETA, I like its approach much more than I do the TPP's, so I would

International Trade committee  My read of TPP, based on my experience as a global tech entrepreneur, is that the structure of the agreement enshrines the benefits and the positions of pre-existing winners and it makes it very hard for other countries to join that club of IP exporters.

International Trade committee  No, it will do precisely the opposite, because it enshrines the pre-existing positions of people who come into it.

International Trade committee  Those are relative—