Getting the Deal Through

Partner and co-chair of Torys' Competition and Foreign Investment Review Practice Dany Assaf and associate Rebecca Moskowitz have co-authored the Canada chapter for the 2015 edition of Pharmaceutical Antitrust, an international review of competition and antitrust developments by country published by Law Business Research. From an overview of the Canadian regulatory framework to specific elements of technology licensing agreements and patents, Dany and Rebecca cover current transactional and regulatory issues affecting pharmaceutical competition and antitrust in Canada. Below is an excerpt.

The current hot topic in Canadian antitrust enforcement in the pharmaceutical sector is the treatment of patent litigation settlement agreements. In September 2014, the Commissioner released a paper on Patent Litigation Settlement Agreements in Canada at the conference on Global Antitrust Agreements in Canada at the conference on Global Antitrust Challenges for the Pharmaceutical Industry at George Mason University. Concurrently, the Competition Bureau released a White Paper the provides a ‘Canadian perspective on the issue’.

The White Paper was unanticipated given that the Competition Bureau had previously indicated its intention to address patent litigation settlements as part of a second round of updates to its Intellectual Property Enforcement Guidelines, the first round of updates to which were also released in September 2014. By issuing the White Paper, the Commissioner has sent a strong signal to the pharmaceutical industry that he intends to closely scrutinize patent litigation settlement agreements that come to his attention, although, unlike in the United States, there is currently no requirement that these agreements be filed with the Competition Bureau.

Click here to download the full article (PDF).

Reproduced with permission from Law Business Research Ltd. This article was first published in Getting the Deal Through: Pharmaceutical Antitrust 2015, (published in April 2015; contributing editor: Mélanie Thill-Tayara, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP). For further information please visit www.gettingthedealthrough.com.