Agriculture committee  Sure. Are you asking specifically about the bee risk assessment or in general?

Agriculture committee  As mentioned, we put a new risk assessment framework in place in 2014, and we developed that jointly with the U.S. EPA and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. That risk assessment is done for all pesticides that would be used where there would be bee exposure. That means all outdoor-use pesticides as well as greenhouse-use pesticides.

Agriculture committee  I would respectfully point to my colleague Steve Pernal, who would be better able to answer that question.

Agriculture committee  It's a challenging area, looking at multiple chemical exposure for bees. We look at that when you have a product that has, for example, two different pesticides in it. We would look at that together, because we know it's being applied together. There has been research, for example, that has shown that certain insecticides and fungicides increase toxicity when they're together.

Agriculture committee  I would just like to say that it was a program that AAFC was looking at: monitoring colony-wide health across Canada. My colleague Steve Pernal could provide more information on that. It's more of a research question in terms of monitoring what's happening with colony health across Canada and getting that information.

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. No, we have not received differences in incident reports. That would be I think the mechanism largely where we would see a difference among provinces. We've received low levels of bee incident reports across all the provinces in Canada, and there hasn't been a difference in reports of incidents from Quebec compared to other provinces.

Agriculture committee  I won't speak to how the EU made their decision, but our assessment was a risk-based assessment that looked at environmental exposure and effects for bees. It followed the new pollinator risk assessment framework that we had developed in conjunction with the U.S. EPA, so it has a large data component.

Agriculture committee  I don't think we have received a submission for registering it, at this point. I think there may have been discussions and presubmission consultations, but we have not received the application for that product to register.

Agriculture committee  The product that was raised in one of the previous hearings.... It was about an application method for oxalic acid—a different way of applying it. I believe that's what you're referring to. I could turn this over to Steve Pernal, who would be more familiar with developments in that area.