An Article in the Vancouver Sun this past weekend raises questions about why the Mayor of the City of Vancouver has applied to register in his own name, the mark ECODENSITY for a housing density initiative that is funded and run by the City. The Mayor indicates in the story that he filed the proposed use application a few days before the initiative was publicly unveiled in order to stop others from doing so.

As the mark was not used by the City at the time the Mayor’s application was filed, the City would have been unable to properly request at that time, that the Registrar give public notice of the City’s adoption and use, as a public authority, of the mark as an Official Mark, pursuant to Section 9 of the Trade-marks Act. Official Mark requests are commonly submitted by all levels of government in Canada, including the City of Vancouver itself, to protect what they consider to be their proprietary marks.

An alternative to filing an application in the Mayor’s own name, would have been to file the proposed use application in the name of the City, as such an application doesn’t require prior adoption and use by the City. It’s also not clear why, now that the City has publicly started promoting its EcoDensity Plan, it has not submitted an Official Mark Request to the Registrar.

In a follow up story today, the Vancouver Sun reports that Vision Vancouver, the opposition civic party, will request an extension of time to oppose the Mayor’s application on or before the deadline to do so.