I would agree with you. That question comes up repeatedly and in almost every sector of agriculture, whether it's horticulture, or grains and oilseeds, or animal health. A common concern is how to get access to leading-edge health products, or pesticides or herbicides, and how to do it quickly and at a reasonable cost.
The own-use permits have been used extensively, as you know. That has been the one saving grace, really, that has allowed a lot of the grains and oilseeds folks to keep things moving, but on other products and in other sectors of the industry it has been more difficult.
There has been some progress on a couple of fronts. One is, of course, that the PMRA is under Health Canada. We might want to debate whether it should be there or under Agriculture, and I know that's a common debate and maybe a good one, but the current head of the PMRA, Karen Dodds, from what everyone tells me, is doing a much better job of being receptive to farmers' concerns. She is listening well; she is trying to work the system to get them products more quickly. So I think there are some good-news stories there. She has been good to work with and has taken the farmers' side on this in a lot of ways. That's going to help quite a bit, because the management of that kind of an agency makes a big difference.
The second thing is that when we make up our own priority lists from the agricultural side and share that with the PMRA, the turnaround time on that has improved greatly. There are, again, some good success stories on that. The problem is that it's only a short list. So we put together the top 10 priorities and share that with the PMRA. That tends to go more quickly. The problem is that a lot more than 10 are required. So we're working with the CFIA and with the Americans—especially the Americans, because that tends to be where the products come from—to try to find ways to not only harmonize approval processes but harmonize the testing process itself so that when programs or tests are designed, we can actually use those results and it will pass muster in Canada as well. Those talks are ongoing, to try as much as possible to move that so that Canadians can get them as quickly as possible.
It's an ongoing problem, though, but we are working on that with PMRA, CFIA, and our own officials to try to get the bottlenecks out of it.