Agriculture committee  Forage and lawn seeds are a little bit different. Forage in particular is actually an area where national registration is working quite well. The reason it is working well is that there haven't been the resources to have recommending committees in some areas. If it's registered i

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  I really can't answer that because we don't have the kinds of trade barrier issues that we would take to a tribunal.

Agriculture committee  That's kind of a hard question, because there's so much restriction on the ability to sell seed—I used wheat as an example across Canada—it's hard to estimate what the impact might be. We represent the private sector, and I know that when a company develops a variety, they genera

Agriculture committee  No, we have a partnership with CropLife Canada, and they do most of the seed treatment work. If it's not treated seed, it generally falls into the bailiwick of CropLife.

Agriculture committee  It is.

Agriculture committee  I think that's more along the lines.... Because agriculture is a shared jurisdiction and for the most part so is environment, you see a lot of things happening, for example, urban pesticide bans where provinces have chosen to ban the use of crop protection materials in certain ar

Agriculture committee  It's an interesting situation. I'm assuming you're talking about variety registration. Theoretically, when you register a variety in Canada, it's supposed to be a national registration. Provinces again—Ontario is a big one; Quebec is a big one—have big concerns around things like

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  They object to registration.

Agriculture committee  No, they cannot sell that variety in Nova Scotia unless it's registered by the Atlantic committee.

Agriculture committee  What generally happens is if a breeder has registered a variety and believes there's potential for it in a region, CFIA goes to that region and asks if they object to the registration in that area, and the numbers that I gave you show that in most cases they do. So there aren't a

Agriculture committee  A lot of the concerns, especially in Ontario and Quebec, are over susceptibility of varieties to fusarium, which can be an issue because the climates are damper there. But fusarium is pretty prevalent, so in most provinces now a lot of the breeding is focusing on trying to develo

Agriculture committee  If they haven't accepted the variety for registration, they would probably put it through the regular trials. Those are also different for different regions, so in Atlantic Canada they may require different things as part of their merit testing, which can be up to three years.

Agriculture committee  Not necessarily. In corn that isn't subject to variety registration, the developers and the breeders do that themselves. They either do that by contributing to industry trials, or they do their own trials.