Why Canada is losing the multi-billion-dollar technology standards game

Earlier this month, I was invited to the annual Bridge Summit hosted by the Via Licensing Alliance in San Francisco. Via, which describes itself as the world’s largest patent pool administrator, licenses the patents inside video codecs, wireless charging and, increasingly, AI data centres. The room was full of licensing executives from the United States, China, Japan, Korea and Europe, there to settle who collects on the next decade’s technologies. I looked for Canadians. I did not find any.

In Davos last January, Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that middle powers must act together “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” He was speaking about geopolitics. He could just as well have been describing technical standards and productivity enhanced value chains, where Canada has been on the menu for a long time.

In these pages, I have previously made three arguments. First, that too many Canadian founders lack basic intellectual property (IP) literacy and bring a knife to an IP gunfight. Second, that a patent alone is not a moat, and that standards are the moat almost no Canadian company uses. Third, that what we do own keeps walking out the door, and that it is time to go elbows up. Fix all three and we will still lose, because the rules of the next economy are being written in rooms where Canada is absent.

Standards are the invisible rulebook of the modern economy. Every phone, car and video stream works because companies agreed on how their products talk to each other. Whoever writes those rules decides whose technology ends up in billions of devices.

About 24,000 patent families were declared essential to 4G wireless technology. For 5G, the count passed 60,000 by 2023, with the 10 largest holders owning about three quarters of them. Standards have also escaped the phone, into cars, EV chargers, payment terminals, data centres and AI.

The money follows. Once a technology is written into a standard, the patents covering it become “standard essential,” and anyone building a compliant product needs a licence. Pools such as Via, Avanci or Sisvel bundle those patents into one licence at a published price. But a pool is also a toll booth, and the booth belongs to whoever contributed the technology. These are patent tolls, not patent trolls. 5G licensing is worth roughly $21 billion a year. Qualcomm Inc.’s licensing arm earned about $8 billion last year, Nokia Corp.’s about $2.4 billion and Ericsson’s about $2.1 billion. Everyone else pays.

Getting your technology into a standard is a long game. It takes engineers who attend meetings worldwide for up to a decade, budgets that survive changes in leadership, and negotiators who can make sure their proposal, not a rival’s, ends up in the final text. Ericsson spends about $7 billion a year on R&D and has submitted more than 90,000 technical contributions to 3GPP, the body that writes cellular standards. Huawei filed 43,753 contributions to 5G alone.

In the latest ranking of patent families declared essential to telecom standards at ETSI, Huawei holds 15,378 and Ericsson 7,988. The only Canadian company in the top 50 is … BlackBerry Ltd., in 45th place, with a paltry 164.

The cruel part is that Canada does not lack ideas. We gave the world insulin and the pacemaker. A Calgary-born engineer created Java. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton won Turing Awards for laying the foundations of today’s AI. We built the BlackBerry. Yet Canada does not appear among the top 100 holders of the roughly three million AI patents filed worldwide. What we do not know is how to turn foundational inventions into standards that pay Canadians.

Consider the voice in your phone. In 1989, researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke filed the first patent on ACELP, a speech compression technology now built into 17 telecom standards and, by the university’s count, more than 95 per cent of the world’s mobile phones. For a while, Canada even ran the toll booths: Montreal’s Sipro Lab Telecom administered the G.729 pools. Then in 2018, VoiceAge sold its patents for EVS, the voice codec in today’s 4G and 5G calls, to an affiliate of the American investment firm Fortress. They are now licensed out of Newport Beach, Calif. We built the lone toll booth, then sold it.

Consider security. Mississauga’s Certicom pioneered elliptic curve cryptography. In 2023, BlackBerry sold some 32,000 patents, Certicom’s among them, to Malikie Innovations, part of Dublin-based Key Patent Innovations. By one recent count, the Irish firm now holds more granted 5G patent families than BlackBerry itself, 71 to 55.

Consider video, where Canadian companies are world leaders. Yet Via’s pool for H.264, the most widely used video standard, does not list a single Canadian patent owner. But its licensees include Genetec, Evertz, Haivision, Ross Video and Mitel, among others. All Canadian based. So world class Canadian firms pay a toll on every unit to practise a standard others wrote.

In 2025, according to Statistics Canada, Canadians paid $28.2 billion in charges for the use of intellectual property and received $10.9 billion, a deficit of about $17 billion. Finland, with 5.7 million people and Nokia, runs a surplus. Not all of that gap comes from standards, but it describes who we have become: a country of implementers that pays at the booth to use technologies we often invented.

Every patent professional has met an inventor who frames his patent and hangs it on the wall. A proud plaque that never earns a cent. Canada has become that inventor at the scale of a nation. Our wall is covered in Nobel Prizes, Turing Awards and foundational patents. The royalties flow to Stockholm, San Diego, Shenzhen and Dublin.

Worse, we pay with Canadian taxpayers’ dollars to keep it that way. In 2024, Ottawa gave Ericsson $79.1 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund, money the government’s own release says will “support the development of international wireless telecommunications industry standards.” Nokia received $40 million in 2019 and another $40 million last year. None of these announcements says a word about who owns the resulting patents; but we know it is not us. Canada banned Huawei from its 5G networks, yet Canadians still pay Huawei a share of the royalties built into their 5G phones.

The legislated mandate of the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) is to “promote efficient and effective voluntary standardization.” Its governing act does not mention intellectual property or patents. In 2024-25, it received $25.6 million from Parliament, some of it temporary. Germany’s equivalent (DIN) had about $162 million in income.

SCC’s own corporate plan sounds the alarm. In 2008, Canada ranked 10th in the G20 for participation in international standards. “As of 2024, Canada ranks among the bottom three countries as funding for Canadian participation is drying up.” Support for Canadian delegates has been halved, to $0.5 million a year. About 3,200 Canadians volunteer their time to standards development, unpaid.

The gap is also structural. Under CUSMA and WTO rules, Canada has committed to base its own technical regulations on international standards. We have signed up to follow rules we are not helping to write, let alone benefit from.

The gap extends to our universities. Standards bodies often invite Canadian professors for their expertise. Few of them know how to declare their patents, preserve their rights or manage their FRAND commitments, the promise to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. I recently watched a leading Canadian researcher work his way through an IEEE standards process essentially alone and he made all the rookie mistakes one can expect. Most university technology transfer offices have no one trained to accompany them.

None of this is new. In 2016, Jim Balsillie, BlackBerry’s former co-CEO, told a House of Commons committee that “none of the aspects that constitute an effective freedom-to-operate strategy are present in Canada today.”

“We don’t have an innovation office; prior art libraries; sovereign patent pools; … sophisticated standards and regulation strategies; or collaboration frameworks designed to commercialize Canadian ideas globally,” he said. “It’s inexcusable.” Ten years later, things are worse. Since he spoke, VoiceAge’s EVS patents and 32,000 BlackBerry patents have left the country, and our IP deficit has nearly doubled, from $9.3 billion in 2016 to $17.3 billion last year.

>Other countries treat this matter as industrial strategy. Korea funds R&D teams specifically to turn their inventions into standard essential patents, and about three quarters of the supported filings end up in draft standards. Germany pays up to 70 per cent of an SME’s cost to participate in standards bodies. The European Union funds more than 300 experts to attend standards meetings. In Washington, the patent office created a working group to bring more small American firms into standards bodies.

Here is what Ottawa should do, starting with AI, quantum and next generation wireless.

• Attach conditions to public R&D money. Any federal grant that funds standards work, including to foreign multinationals, should come with Canadian co-ownership, licence-back rights or, at minimum, public reporting of the resulting standard essential patents.
• Give standards a strategic owner. Let the Standards Council keep its traditional role of accrediting standards development and conformity assessment bodies. Extend the mandate of Digital Transformation Canada, the new agency already charged with putting federal purchasing power behind Canadian technology firms, so it leads standards policy and the ITU file now held by ISED, and coordinates Canadian companies and researchers in the standards bodies that matter. What Ottawa buys and the standards Canadians write should finally line up.
• Fund participation where the tolls are set. 3GPP, IEEE, the IETF and the consortia, not only ISO. Pay for experts’ travel and time, and confirm that standards work qualifies for SR&ED tax credits.
• Back the Digital Governance Standards Institute, Canada’s only body recognized to submit standards directly for ISO/IEC approval, to build standards that carry Canadian IP.
  Launch a Korean style program to turn publicly funded research into standard essential patents, with a measurable target.
• Require every research university to have staff trained in standards and IP who can advise and accompany researchers into standards bodies.
• Review foreign acquisitions of Canadian standard essential patent portfolios under the Investment Canada Act. VoiceAge and BlackBerry should be the last such lessons.
• Measure it. No one in Ottawa counts how many standard essential patents Canadians own.

Improving IP literacy, strategy and ownership inside our companies remains essential. But it will not count for much unless it is mirrored nationally, in the rooms where the rules are written. Washington understands this. In January, it quit 66 international organizations but kept its seats at the ITU, ISO and IEC. In June, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that “the nation that fails to help write the rules of the next economy will sooner or later answer to those that did.”

Canada has been answering for decades. If we want to collect rather than pay, we must show up, stay for a decade and own what we contribute. Otherwise, as our own prime minister put it, we will stay on the menu.

Louis Carbonneau is the founder and CEO of Tangible IP, a patent brokerage and advisory firm.