By Scott Hervey

Canada has made a fundamental change in its Trade-mark Examination practice. It had been a longstanding practice in the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (the governmental body responsible for reregistering trade-marks) of determining the priority of applications based on the earliest of the following: the date of first use or making known in Canada, the date of filing in Canada, or the date of filing of the Paris Convention priority application. The legitimacy of assessing priority in this regard was challenged and overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals in May of this year in Attorney General of Canada v. Effigi (2005 FCA 172).
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