“Louis Vuitton” handbags for the price of a sandwich.
“Rolex” watches that cost as little as a T-shirt.
You would not expect to find such obvious fakery at a suburban shopping mall in Canada. But, according to the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), deals of this sort are available at the Pacific Mall in Markham, near Toronto, which calls itself “the largest Chinese shopping mall in North America”.
Its latest report on “notorious markets” lists the three-floor mall alongside the Silk Market in Beijing, Tank Road in Delhi and El Tepito, an open-air market in Mexico City, as places where people can buy counterfeit goods. It is the first time a Canadian bricks-and-mortar outlet has appeared in the report, which has been published since 2011.
Canada appears regularly on the USTR’s annual list of countries that are doing too little to protect intellectual property. The USTR estimates that global trade in counterfeit goods is worth $500bn a year, about 2.5% of total imports. Until now, it has directed most of its complaints about physical retail outlets at developing countries where the rule of law is weak. By fingering the Pacific Mall it is turning up the heat on Canada.
In 2014 Canada enacted a law to give customs officers more power to detain shipments and toughened sanctions against people who violate copyrights and trademarks. But after hunting out drugs, guns and illegal immigrants, border guards have little time and money to look for non-Swiss Swiss watches. Over the past two and a half years Canada has detained fewer than 50 suspect shipments, says Lorne Lipkus, a Canadian lawyer who specialises in counterfeiting issues. American customs catch some 30,000 a year.
