I won't say it's certainly been the situation for much of PMRA's history. When I started, one of the first things I did, and encouraged other staff to do, was to get out and meet farm organizations. Within the first week one of the meetings I attended was the annual meeting of the Canadian Horticultural Council. I have pretty much gone from coast to coast meeting with farmers and farm organizations from P.E.I., Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
You can't meet with all Canadian farmers. There are hundreds of thousands of growers, but in going across the country you do meet with those who are very interested in their industry and interested in trying to make a positive contribution to where their industry is going. I have spoken with farmers who probably wanted to throw rotten tomatoes at me, but I have spoken with farmers who are very interested in trying to improve their growing practices, their agricultural practices.
I found their associations very open to discussion. We have certainly benefited enormously over the last two or three years from the input from farm organizations and grower organizations in terms of what pesticides they're interested in, the technology gap, and the difference in the number of products registered for different uses in the States versus Canada. We will never completely close, and we explained to farmers that a lot of the products they were interested in were older pesticides and they wouldn't meet our current standards, but we were very interested in working with them on some of the newer products where we realize there is either a lower risk to human health or a lower risk to the environment. Again, a project like 914, where all parties have a role to play in saying these are appropriate products for us to look at, has been very positive.