As a trade association, the issue of pesticide prices or how our members market them, as you might suspect, is not an area we engage in, nor do we want to, but we must be seen to be making sure that we are not offside with any competition law.
That said, there are studies done on a regular basis by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. I think Ridgetown College, for example, collaborates with the USDA. In any given year, there are pricing studies out in the marketplace relative to pesticides as well as other inputs.
My experience over the years, reading those studies, is that in any given year you will find that there are some pesticides in the U.S. that are cheaper and some in Canada that are cheaper. Obviously, in that timeframe you will have fluctuations up and down.
The observation you made now I can't corroborate, because we ourselves don't track them, but others might make the reverse observation. When the Canadian dollar was really, really low and manufacturers were buying active ingredients with a really devalued dollar, many could make the observation, perhaps, that during that time there was no increase in pesticide prices.
What I'm trying to come to is that there are a number of factors, including the types of pesticides that our growers want to use in terms of the sophisticated approach they tend to take, and I think some of the studies have shown that for certain Manitoba growers versus their counterparts right across the border.
It's a complex issue, not one that trade associations typically engage themselves in, but it gets back to some of the comments that were made earlier by our colleagues and ourselves. At the end of the day, what we're talking about here is that with harmonization a lot of these issues go away.