Canada tested 100 trademark registrations at random and 54 died without a reply.

The capital is CAD $702.70 (USD $500 at 1.4054, Bank of Canada daily average, 20 October 2026 — the 21 October rate had not been posted at the time of writing) and the target is CAD $7,027.00 a month (USD $5,000), or CAD $84,324.00 a year. The claim of this edition is that Canada maintains the cheapest and most lopsided deadwood-clearing procedure in the common-law world, that its own regulator ran a controlled experiment proving the register is more than half dead on contact, and that almost nobody uses it.

Section 45 of the Trademarks Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. T-13, last amended by 2018, c. 27, s. 222, is three paragraphs of procedure that behave like a weapon. Subsection 45(1): the Registrar shall, at the written request of “any person who pays the prescribed fee”, require a registered owner to furnish within three months an affidavit or statutory declaration showing whether the mark was used in Canada in the preceding three years. CIPO’s own practice notice, amended 22 January 2026, says the Registrar will issue the notice “unless the Registrar sees good reason for not doing so”, decided case by case. In practice that bar is close to the floor.

Then comes the part that makes the economics strange. Subsection 45(2): “The Registrar shall not receive any evidence other than the affidavit or statutory declaration” — meaning the owner’s. CIPO’s guidance to the requesting party is blunter still: “Do not submit evidence.” You are not permitted to. You cannot cross-examine the affiant either; the procedure has no provision for it. You pay a fee, you name a registration number, and the entire cost of the proceeding lands on the other side — affidavit, exhibits, service, representations, agent time — or the registration dies.

That is the trade, and it is worth naming who is on each side of it. The buyer is anyone who wants a name. The seller is a registered owner who, three or more years after registration, has to decide whether a mark they may no longer sell under is worth the cost of swearing to it. The Registrar is the house, and it takes $595.06 either way.

Who actually sends these notices is public, because every decision is styled with the requesting party’s name. In 2025 and 2026 they include 14095863 Canada Inc., a federal numbered company incorporated for $200, which attacked six Moosehead Breweries registrations at once and took one of them off the register; an individual, Regeena Lifeso, against Toys “R” Us (Canada) Ltd; and a two-person partnership, Mohammid Simon and Kenniesha Simon, trading as Killa Garments, against Kurt Geiger Limited. Law firms file in their own names too — Borden Ladner Gervais LLP v JAWHP, LLC, Shift Law Professional Corporation v Joanna Habbous — which is the tell: the requesting party is a party in its own right, not an agent for anybody.

The non-consensus reading is that the Canadian trademark bar has the economics backwards. In fiscal 2024–25 it filed 1,160 statements of opposition at $1,115.08 each, fighting applications that have not yet become anything, and got 111 decisions. It filed 923 section 45 notices at the cheaper fee, attacking registrations that already exist and already block, and got 690 decisions — 6.22 times as many outcomes from fewer filings. Oppositions mostly evaporate. Section 45 proceedings mostly decide.

And the whole national take from section 45 is $549,240.38 a year at the 2026 fee: 923 notices against 70,207 applications filed, one notice for every 76.06 applications. Canada’s register absorbed 74,793 new applications in calendar 2025, 64.59% of them from outside the country — 17,799 from the United States and 10,913 from China. The register grows from abroad and is pruned by almost no one.

There is a second regulation that decides what kind of business this can be, and it is the one most people miss. Trademarks Regulations, SOR/2018-227, s. 25(1): “a person may be represented by another person only if that other person is a trademark agent”. The exceptions in s. 25(3) — filing an application, paying a fee, renewing — do not include a section 45 proceeding. So an unlicensed person cannot run one for a client. They can be the requesting party themselves, which the Act expressly permits, and they can sell the research that decides which registration to point at. The published case styles show the whole market already arranged this way.

One number should temper all of this. CIPO cut its examination inventory by 42% in 2025 and brought the wait to examination down to 7.8 months from a peak near 1,700 days. The backlog that made a blocking registration unbearable is gone. What remains is the register itself, and the Registrar’s own sample says more than half of it will not defend.