The Pest Management Regulatory Agency is a branch of Health Canada. It's called an agency, but that's just its name. I report to the deputy minister, as do the other assistant deputy ministers, but my title is different. We are part of Health Canada, and it's the Minister of Health who is responsible for the Pest Control Products Act.
When we do joint reviews, we are clear that all of the participating countries have the authority to make their own decisions. We're clear that we're not accepting U.S. decisions, and for a long time I think farmers were actually wanting us to accept U.S. decisions. That's part of why I say the experience is that we come to the same decision, but we are clear when we participate that we can differ; we may not have the same agreements.
We find it's very helpful when our scientific evaluators can discuss issues with the U.S. and European scientific evaluators in that there is, in many ways, strength in numbers. They can discuss these issues and come more and more to a common decision. But we're not sacrificing health and environmental standards when we're working on joint reviews. We're clear; we have our health and environmental standards.
Again, that's one of the benefits for us of the GROU versus the own-use import. The GROU looks specifically at products from countries that are on par with us as a regulator, as compared to some countries whose standards we don't know and that we don't have confidence in as regulators.