Canada altered its patent regime with the aim of reducing prosecution time and to streamline the examination process.
They are expected to affect patent applicants' prosecution strategies in Canada.
The final text of the amendments to the Canadian Patent Rules was registered in the Orders in Council of Canada on June 2, 2022. Some charged are set to come into force on July 1, 2022, while other changes have a coming-into-force date on October 3, 2022.
One such change is the Excess Claims Fee, which sets a fee of $100.00 CAD for each claim over 20. These excess claims fee will be applied in two instances during prosecution. At the time of requesting examination and at the time of paying the final fee where the number of claims in excess of 20 will be counted. This change will come into effect on October 3, 2022.
4 Requests for Continued Examinations will be available under the new patent regime. Currently, the process followed allows for the application to have any number of examination reports until the Examiner deems that the application is in condition for allowance. The new process states that after 3 examination reports, a RCE may be filed with a government fee of $816.00 CAD.
One RCE provides two examination reports, subsequent RCEs may be filed for two additional examination reports. This also effects the amendment of applications after a Notice of Allowance
of an examination report.
Additional minor changes include a Conditional Notice of Allowance, allowing applicants to correct minor defects in application within a deadline of 4 months, allowing to correct obvious errors in translation and changes to comply with the Patent Cooperation Treaty sequence listing standard.