Agriculture committee  I think my colleague Dennis Prouse explained fairly well in his presentation that the plant breeders' rights do increase the possibility for greater investment in Canada and greater innovation and so on. It's about protecting the investments. That's the key thing for us.

Agriculture committee  That's what our members are informing us of. That's what we anticipate, yes.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Personally, that's the most exciting part of these proposed amendments from our perspective, so just very quickly, to create a plum of novel traits through biotechnology or other modern plant breeding techniques, a number of steps need to take place to ensure safety: the environm

Agriculture committee  Perhaps I can build on part of your question, if I understood correctly, regarding how the private sector and the public sector can work together more effectively to address some of the challenges you are talking about. I can't speak for individual companies that are members of o

Agriculture committee  Actually, when I was listening to your question I had a slightly different answer in mind, but it touches on what our friends at Genome Prairie were talking about, and that's around education. If decisions are being made for political and emotional reasons, as is happening in E

Agriculture committee  Absolutely.

Agriculture committee  I don't have an answer for you because it's going to take a big collective effort between government and the various parts of industry and research institutes. I was at a meeting recently at the FAO addressing what my colleague was talking about, low level presence in plant biot

Agriculture committee  I'll have a go, and I'm sure that my colleagues on the other side in Saskatchewan may want to help me out as well. Selective breeding is the very basic level of plant breeding. If you were doing some sunflower breeding in your back garden, you would be crossing different types

Agriculture committee  As a quick answer, in part, yes, for sure....

Agriculture committee  Agronomic practices, better machinery, GPS, getting a better sense of the moisture content in the field in more precise ways, all these things contribute.

Agriculture committee  Not really, but I think we have to put this into the perspective of what plant breeding is s all about, and what people have been trying to achieve for the last 100 to 200 years of plant breeding. It's all about keeping ahead of nature, keeping ahead of the new insect pests and

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. I don't know where to start, actually. If you think about crop plants in Canada, if you think about the field crops such as canola, soy beans, and corn as a measure of success, these crops have definitely benefited from plant biotechnology research to the

Agriculture committee  I understand what you're saying in terms of how the risk assessment information is generated. It is generated by the proponents, be that a private company, a public institution, or a university laboratory and so on. That's the system we have in Canada. It's exactly the same in al

Agriculture committee  I think I can attempt to answer. Something we haven't talked about today is: what do we mean by biotechnology anyway? If I can backtrack, the products that we've been talking about, the insect-resistant corn, herbicide-tolerant soya beans, and so on, those were all developed in