I think the biggest thing we can do off the bat is renew and revitalize our regulatory system. It plays an important role in ensuring that we have safe products, both for food and for the environment. But it also needs to be reinvented so we can ensure.... These innovations are global, and they will go to the markets that are going to accept them and where there is large market opportunity.
The reality is that the Canadian marketplace, in comparison to the United States or to Europe, is not big. So we have to create a reason for those innovations to come to Canadian crops. Why would a global company want to invest in a Canadian crop? Because there is a clear, predictable, timely regulatory system that they know they can get their product through. They can get it approved for safety and get it into commercial production.
For instance, if we look at novel traits and GM crops, Canada was a global leader in adopting that technology. I would say that now we have fallen behind. When you look at the second wave or the second generation of traits, which are the ones that are going to drive more profit to the farmer but also to the bio-economy, we've been waiting for an agriculture policy on plant molecular farming and on having traits for industrial and pharmaceutical use since 2001. So we've been sitting without a policy and without a regulatory framework for five or six years now. That says that Canada is not open for business. That's the signal it sends to the world.
The only thing worse than a bad regulatory system is no regulatory system, and that's where we are today. So that innovation is going south of the border. And we end up in a situation similar to what we have in pesticides, where farmers have access to all kinds of new and wonderful products south of the border, but we don't have them here. We're going down the same road with bio-economy products.
The reality is, as Richard said, that we are set up on Canadian farms to have that innovation. We have the ability to segregate on farms. From a farm management standpoint, we're way ahead globally. So we need to get our regulatory system tuned up and ready to take these products on.
Health claims would be another example. For a decade we've been trying to get a health claims policy in place whereby the Canadian food industry can make those kinds of claims and get that extra advantage for their products. So for a decade we've been waiting for that to come through.
Those are just a couple of examples.