The new act does give us strengthened post-registration controls. Part of that is realized with the two sets of regulations I mentioned. One is the incident reporting, which includes adverse affects. Once that's implemented--I believe it's in force on January 1, 2007, so the beginning of the new year--it will be mandatory for registrants to report to us all incident reports received, including adverse affects. That includes transmitting to us information received in the U.S. as well.
The new act requires that we undertake a re-evaluation of all of the older pesticides every 15 years. We had already begun that, by policy, in advance of implementation of the new act.
It also gives us some new tools so that we can now demand of registrants information at the outset of a re-evaluation rather than waiting for them to decide that they want to submit information to us.
As well, as part of the management of chemicals action plan, there is some money for biomonitoring. Information collected, starting this fall, done by Statistics Canada and funded by the government, includes some biomonitoring of analytes, which can indicate exposure to pesticides.
So we are very interested in improving our understanding of what is happening in the environment after products have been registered. For the first time, we've had the position of an epidemiologist established within PMRA. We've already started the work of recruiting an epidemiologist to look at the human data we have as well as all the toxicological studies that the registrants have to submit.