Agriculture committee  Under UPOV 78, we can keep and save seeds without necessarily asking permission from the breeder. The breeder could not have access to our harvests. He could not have surveillance over our harvests. We could actually save seeds to the extent the breeder could not. UPOV 91 has t

Agriculture committee  How to enforce farmers' privilege under UPOV 91? That's exactly what Canada has done to enact farmers' privilege under UPOV 91. Enforcement is a matter of subsidiary regulation. A lot of power has been given to breeders in terms of licensing, in terms of surveillance, in terms

Agriculture committee  Our law has a very high standard of infringement, so innocent infringement is not tolerated under our Patent Act.

Agriculture committee  If you look at UPOV 78, you do have that even though it didn't specifically call it farmers' privilege.

Agriculture committee  A common law of contracts in Canada would always give us freedom of contracts, in which case we can contract out of statute. It really depends. A contract is really a contract.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  With UPOV 78, we are good. In all fairness to international trade and global competition, most of our trading partners have upgraded to UPOV 91 even though it is not what I would be inclined to do. As a Canadian, in a global competitive market, coming to UPOV 91 puts us at par wi

Agriculture committee  The bill is clear. I don't know of any specific cereal, to the extent that a breeder has been able to add a certain degree of improvement to a variety and have a proprietary claim. As we said time and again, plant breeders' rights are not patent rights because they allow breeders

Agriculture committee  Unfortunately, I haven't really paid attention to that and I would not want to mislead the committee.

Agriculture committee  Maybe that's not exactly what I meant. But the whole idea of not allowing people who farm, who may be family farmers, smallholder farmers, who could possibly be organic farmers.... It's the whole idea of not telling us that they have a privilege. But that privilege forbidding the

Agriculture committee  If you look at clause 5, that I read out to you, it has not accommodated the ability of a smallholder farmer. Let's talk about this idea of saving seeds, the big advantage of saving seeds. We know what happened in Monsanto. Somebody could have had something come on to their farm,

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. Of course there is a difference between privilege and rights. But when a privilege is enacted and specifically provided for, as in Bill C-18, it looks as if it gets teeth to bite with. To that extent, I'm not losing sleep over whether we choose “privilege” o

Agriculture committee  Yes, if need be.

Agriculture committee  One can speak to a few of them, to the extent that they are interested in how many acres qualify for a smallholder farm and the complex nature of administering that kind of system. Sometimes it might be by way of harvest: what is the percentage of income that a smallholder farmer

Agriculture committee  I would suggest, seriously, that we pay attention to that. It would take us to really understanding the landscape for agricultural production in our country. Some have used 10 acres; some have used something in that neighbourhood. Some have said, well, you might have 10 acres, bu