Thank you, Chairman Bezan and members of the committee.
I've been given 10 minutes. Please excuse me if I use English. If I tried to do it in French, I'd need 100 minutes and wouldn't do it very well. I apologize for that.
A number of the points made by Karen and also by Gordon are things that I will skip over for my presentation. I want to focus on a couple of things.
The proposed GROU program for import is only a part of a much bigger suite of new programs and policies developed and recommended by the working group and signed for by all of the members. There was no dissenting vote. Everyone signed.
It's important to understand—and I don't have to tell you this—that when you sign an agreement that's made up of many parts, probably nobody is happy with all the parts, but in order to live with the totality of the agreement, there is enough in there for each person who signed that they were willing to swallow some parts they weren't happy with.
Cherry-picking of any piece of that agreement after the fact really negates the balance of the decision that was reached and signed for by all the players. If we start cherry-picking and taking things out or putting things in, some of the groups will leave the table and not agree to the package. When the steering group started, it was a very polarized group of people, and at the end we all came into the middle. It is important to recognize that there was all-party agreement to all the pieces that were brought forward.
In the interest of Canadian farmers, it has to be clear that the sum total of the benefits that were agreed to is greater than the net value, including the current flaws of the current OUI program. Included in this total of benefits, as was mentioned, is that there is no cost to growers to try to prove equivalents. There will be corporate support for the product issues if and when they arise. A far greater number of products can be identified on an annual basis and proposed annually for importation. A perfect program would mean nothing ever has to cross the border because price discipline would kick in. By actually nominating 50, 75, or 100 products for importation based on monitoring of prices by Agriculture Canada, which has agreed to do this, it would be a firm signal to the companies to get their prices in line, and all farmers of all commodities that those are registered on would gain the benefit far more than with one product that's part of the current program today. When that product is the largest selling pesticide in Canada, it's much more difficult for a whole lot of smaller market products to ever see the light of day under the current program.
There will be a container management program under the CropLife umbrella, which has been voluntarily been doing this for 20-odd years, and doing it very well. As I said, there will be support from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada for a better and more comprehensive price monitoring program, so that growers could make a fair decision on whether something is a problem price-wise or not. Perhaps we can even find a way to solve some of the provincial legislative problems that exist with the OUI program and the NAFTA labelling program, and Gordon mentioned the need to solve the technology gap. We all agree with that.
In summary, the Canadian Horticultural Council is fully supportive of this suite of new programs. We are not in favour of the OUI program as it has been practised for the past two years, and that is because of the flaws in that program that were iterated earlier.
We recognize, however, that not all the players are as confident as we are, and we respectfully suggest that in order to give the GROU program a fair chance, a fair trial, the OUI program be suspended--not taken off the books, just pushed aside while the GROU program has a fair chance to show that it can work. If it doesn't work, the OUI is still on the books and it could be re-implemented the next day.
In order to determine whether the GROU program in a trial has been successful, there need to be a number of questions asked of it.
First and foremost, did price discipline occur? In other words, did the price gap close so that Canadian growers did not face higher prices than the Americans did? Second, how much product actually did come in under this program? If product is coming in, that means price discipline didn't happen. Third, did the issues of container management and product stewardship get resolved?
These are some of the warts in the current program. Can the provinces deal with the products coming in under the GROU program? Right now, nine to ten provinces' provincial legislation cannot regulate these products. They're orphan chemicals when they come in under the OUI program.
Did Agriculture Canada provide enough accurate data to allow appropriate decisions to be made? That's very important. When the PSR II is passed, the real test will be the number of new generic pesticide applications and the access of Canadians to Canadian-registered generics, which is the whole reason that pricing for a product like glyphosate has dropped the price in the U.S.
How many new minor uses have come into Canada? Has the PMRA's Project 914 to close the technology gap worked?
Then, and only then, can we do a fair evaluation of whether GROU is doing all that we think it can.
I'd like to thank you for considering all these points, not just some of them. And remember that all growers across Canada, for very many crops, stand to gain materially from the possibility of the advantages of all the new approaches the committee agreed to.
Thank you.