Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. To give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I study the issues of innovation as they relate to agrifood and trade. I've spent the better part of 13 years in a series of research chairs, research projects, funded by the granting councils and by various agen

Agriculture committee  Sure. I'll answer your last question first. Is there a method that could actually deliver the intent of the bill? I'm an economist. Whoever pays me can get advice out of me, and sometimes that means that you will get multiple bits of advice on what the market effect will be. The

Agriculture committee  I have two very quick points. Argentina has suffered an investment chill in the last 10 or 15 years, not because of the regulatory changes but because it got into a dispute over ownership of the intellectual property. The new rules may or may not improve the transfer of technolo

Agriculture committee  Let me offer a really quick point about the first one. It's not what happens but who does it. If the state begins to do certain activities, you will create some precedents that you may not want to see adopted more widely. We are heavy traders of commodities around the world, and

Agriculture committee  Part of it is that sometimes the hit is small enough that it's difficult to quantify and to actually show a cause and effect, which the law courts require. That happens in many markets, where there are effects of new technology or other market participants doing things that affec

Agriculture committee  As you're probably aware, the provinces and the federal government have laws that deal with intermingling between the production of two systems. I'm not a lawyer, but there are strong precedents in legal practice as to how those things work. I would advise, if you want to get int

Agriculture committee  Let me make a quick observation. Yes, the technology is getting cheaper in one way, but while the technology is getting cheaper, the networks that you need to actually put it into commercially viable platforms are getting more expensive. It's more industrially controlled, and the

Agriculture committee  There's a three-level discussion going on here. There are state-to-state discussions, there are industry discussions, and then there's the interface between the two. Generally, firms only do the interface discussion when there's a specific product they need to get through some sy

Agriculture committee  I have two very simple points. The first one is that I think everyone at the table and everyone who studies this would strongly agree that the health issue should be dealt with before it gets to this stage. This debate is about after it has passed Health Canada's rigorous systems

Agriculture committee  Not personally, no. I'm an economist.

Agriculture committee  You should probably get the regulators in here to talk about their science because they don't actually write it down very well. But there is an extensive body of science they use: some that comes from the proponents, which is very specific; some that comes from the international

Agriculture committee  One really quickly then. This debate has been characterized as if there are GM-free countries and GM countries. Every country in the world that has an advanced industrial economy uses the technology. They just use it selectively.

Agriculture committee  Just a really quick comment: we don't feed the world right now anyway. We produce extremely high-quality food for markets, for the most part, that don't need more food. We succeed because we produce really the best of the lot. We're going for the top 5% or 10%. If we don't go for

Agriculture committee  I have a couple of quick comments. At the moment nobody has that test, so this would be novel. Let me perhaps amplify that by saying that we already have two additional hurdles compared to any other market that regulates GM technologies. We have the plants with a novel trait hurd

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Let me begin by saying that this is an important study you've started. I think it's vital that Canada look at renewing and revitalizing its national agrifood policy. In that context, I think the core message coming from all of us, in one way or another, is that innova