Thank you for that question. Mr. Chair, it will be my pleasure to address that.
Fundamentally, if you look at the differences between UPOV 78 and UPOV 91, the advantages fall into three key categories. The first is strengthening the intellectual property protection. One of the weaknesses under the current system is that the breeders' exclusive rights only were centred around sale of propagating material or production of propagating material. The breeder is going to be afforded, under UPOV 91, additional protection in terms of exclusive rights over importing and exporting and all other activities that are really designed to prepare for the purpose of sale, so it's going to create an environment that's more attractive to invest in.
The other element is it falls under the category of facilitating access to the PBR framework, so some key provisions that will encourage users, plant breeders, to utilize the Canadian system, and those ones are really around the definition of novelty. It allows plant breeders to test the Canadian marketplace before deciding to protect. Quite often, to go through the process can be quite expensive, so they can determine the validity of the market before they make that determination of protecting the variety.
The other aspect is provisional protection. Conceptually it's very similar to patent pending. Once they file in the system, and they're accepted for filing, they're afforded all the benefits of protection until grant of right.
Those are two key ones. There's really a third one that is very important and it enshrines certain provisions around balancing interests between developer and farmer and also benefit sharing.
The three of them are mandatory UPOV requirements. There's the breeders' exemption. What that means is you can use any PBR-protected variety to breed a new PBR-protected variety, a new variety. There's a researcher exemption, which means that you can use a PBR-protected variety to conduct research. Also, there's a non-commercial exemption, which means if you are a hobbyist or an amateur gardener, you can use a PBR-protected variety without restriction.