Mr. ANDREW MoMASTER (Brome) moved for leave to introduce Bill No. 37, to amend the Patent Act.
He said: The present Patent Act provides that if a person has invented any new or useful improvement or process, he may obtain a patent upon it; but as the law presently exists, that patent may be defeated and the real inventor deprived of the reward of his inventive faculty, if someone else has used this apparatus or process in any other part of the world. Thus a man might have an improvement, entirely unknown in Canada, for something in connection with an automobile, but someone in the south of Italy, altogether unknown to him, may have invented the same improvement. The object of . this bill is to give a patent to anyone who is the first inventor in Canada. I am informed that this bill will place our patent law on the same basis as the patent laws of the United Kingdom and the patent laws of the United States. Our law, as it at present stands, is harder on the inventor than the patent law of either of those two countries.
The other part of the bill provides for the correction of what is not exactly a clerical error, but an error of inadvertence, in the drafting of the Patent Act some two years ago. The draftsman forgot that there had been carved out of what used to be known as the Northwest Territories two very important provinces named Saskatchewan and Alberta. The act provides that what was called the Supreme court of the Northwest Territories should have jurisdiction over patents until that court disappeared and supreme courts of the provinces carved out of this part of the Dominion took its place. When that patent law was passed Alberta and Saskatchewan had been in existence for a number of years. This part of the bill corrects what I might call an historical inexactitude.
Motion agreed to and bill read the first time.