Transport committee  Thank you for your question. I have two important points. First of all, with regard to alliances, the process already exists. The same process that currently exists in the Canada Transportation Act for mergers is what we are now introducing for joint ventures. This notion ab

Transport committee  I would like to say something about the competition policy. The beginning of this law was a function of the fact that we believed that there were considerations beyond those of a strict competition nature that needed to be considered in a joint venture transaction. That's what's

Transport committee  You bet. We're interested in this bill both because we think it's good for competition policy and because it's good for innovation and science and economic development. I think the interest is that a clearer, transparent internationally competitive joint venture process will allo

Transport committee  No, other than that there are considerable powers afforded in the Competition Act for the commissioner of competition to examine the Canadian marketplace for any zones in which there's potentially anti-competitive behaviour. Whether that's abuse of dominance, price-fixing, decept

Transport committee  It won't be our department but the minister of transport and the Department of Transport will have the capacity after two years to revisit the transaction as it was initially proposed. That's not the end of immunity; that's the potential for the reconsideration of the arrangement

Transport committee  Public interest considerations can mean a number of things. The way Bill C-49 is laid out is there will be a guideline-setting process that will essentially be open for consultation to allow for parties to help inform that, but that can include things like safety, tourism, connec

Transport committee  The guidelines will be very clear about what constitutes a public interest benefit, and there will be a necessity to be able to manifest those public interest benefits with the possibility from the minister to continue the manifestation of those benefits as the joint venture beco

Transport committee  I would suggest that the goal of this is to try to ensure that parties on both sides of the equation, the minister of transport on one and the commissioner of competition on the other, and the parties themselves have clarity about what the expectation is and that it can then be c

Transport committee  My bureau colleagues may want to intervene, but the remedial orders rest with the minister of transport, because ultimately those remedial orders are subject to the minister's decision to approve or not. The actual negotiation of those remedial orders is informed by both the comm

Transport committee  I'll start, and my bureau colleagues may want to intervene. One of the reasons we introduced the joint venture provisions in Bill C-49 as they are now is that currently joint ventures in this country actually don't have any set timelines necessarily, because they are subject to

Transport committee  Thanks so much. Bill C-49 proposes a new approach to metal-neutral joint ventures, or joint ventures in the air sector. Right now they are assessed solely on the basis of competition and competition law, wherein the primary considerations are duration of competition and economic

Industry committee  A superquick response would be that those commercialization and innovation outcomes and the weak performance were really at the heart of the innovation and skills plan. The IP strategy is a part of that partly because we recognize that one of the tools in getting to better outcom

Industry committee  There is a transparent registry of patent filings that does have the disclosure. The only other point I'd put on the disclosure is—and Alison and I have been talking about this in the context of the IP strategy—there have been a number of initiatives that Alison pointed to, inclu

Industry committee  We have a number of metrics that we continue, and to Alison's point, the challenge of getting at the right metrics in the intellectual property space is a hard one. The number of patents filed is only one indicator. We have licensing revenue, for instance, that comes into the ins

Industry committee  Licensing revenue is a good indicator of that, in part because licensing suggests that someone's paying you for the use of the intellectual property, which means it's actually in application. In terms of the degree to which you can then actually look at use, it would vary by the