Trademark owners and trademark lawyers around the world have noticed that trademark examination in Canada seems to have slowed down over the past few years, and is now much slower than nearly all other countries.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office is currently examining applications filed in November 2018, which means that the current time to first examination is 30-31 months. The Office publishes regular statistics, which can be found here, which lists the inventory, which is the number of applications that have been filed, but not examined.

When these number are plotted on a graph going back to July 2015, we can see that the inventory has increased sixfold in under six years. The inventory number, which was for a number of years steadily between 25,000 and 30,000 applications waiting to be examined, is now over 160,000. The inventory number has increased every single month since February 2017.

International trademark applications filed in Canada through the Madrid system are being examined before the 18 month mark, and CIPO has recently introduced a new practice notice for allowing the examination of trademark applications to be expedited under certain specific circumstances. For the majority of applicants who do not meet these narrow criteria, we anticipate that, in the absence of extraordinary measures being introduced, the time until first examination will continue to increase, and will likely hit the three year mark sometime in 2022. It is hoped that extraordinary measures, which do not compromise the quality of examination, are introduced before that prediction comes to pass.