Territorial sovereignty matters – or so the two most important recent events in international relations would suggest: the United Nations’ decision to approve the Libya’s Transitional Council and Palestine’s bid for UN membership are both at their core, about the power of the state. At home, the Canada First Defence Strategy states, “The defence of Canada’s sovereignty and the protection of territorial integrity in the Arctic remains a top priority for the government.”

And yet, in an age of Apple authority and Google government, does land really matter? Does state power derive from territorial integrity – or something else? In a knowledge economy, what assets are of true value to Canada?   

Over the past year, two events have opened the space to contemplate these questions. First, last November, the federal government interfered to halt the world’s biggest mining company’s hostile bid for Saskatchewan-based Potash Corp, claiming that a takeover of this “strategic resource” would not meet the “net benefit” test under the Investment Canada Act.

Eight months later, Nortel’s 6,000-deep patent portfolio went up for auction; a group including Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Sony Corp. paid $4.5 billion (U.S.) for rights to the patents. This vast trove of intellectual property owed its existence in large part to years of taxpayer contributions; and had the federal government intervened to help Nortel to stave off bankruptcy during its precipitous decline from 2007 to 2009, it is likely that what Intel called a “gold mine” would be in the same position as Potash is today – in Canadian hands. 

But can intellectual property even be in Canadian hands? The Canadian International Council’s new report on intellectual property describes a global economy fuelled by “borderless information flows and unprecedented labour mobility.” Is intellectual property simply part of the borderless flow of information, passing over national boundaries unannounced, or is it property in the same way that the nitrogen and phosphate deep in Saskatchewan’s soil is property?

Professor of intellectual property law Daniel Gervais and MaRS Innovation CEO Rafi Hofstein argue that Canada’s national interest must be redefined to account for intellectual property. David Wolfe, co-director of the Program on Globalization and Regional Innovation Systems at the University of Toronto, explains why the time for national action is now: too many Canadian small and medium enterprises with impressive patent portfolios are subject to takeover. Professor Richard Gold, founding director of McGill’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy, takes a different angle, examining to what extent intellectual property policy can form part of Canada’s development policy. 

The United Nations definition of sovereignty, articulated in Articles 2(4) as “territorial integrity,” is an invention of the Westphalian era. Today, the international system is undergoing a transformation as profound as that it underwent in 1648. It may be time to reconceptualize our notion of sovereignty – and our idea of the assets to which it applies.