Perhaps I can answer that question. This regulation is a disaster because there are two ways of importing a product into Canada. The first way consists in asking the producer outside of Canada to respect all the standards and to be certified by an accredited certification body in Canada that applies Canadian standards. We know that this will not happen very frequently on a worldwide basis, because we only have a small market. Therefore, we need some flexibility as far as imports are concerned.
The second way of importing a product into Canada consists in negotiating equivalency agreements with foreign countries. On Monday, we learned that Canada will probably announce the signing of an equivalency agreement with the U.S.A. Now, the content of this agreement is raising serious concerns. If we do not sign an agreement with the U.S.A., there will be almost no products left that could come into Canada, and we do not want that.
From the outset, we have been asking that the regulations provide a mechanism whereby we can unilaterally evaluate whether a standard or a system of benchmarks are acceptable to us, just as the Europeans and the Americans do. There is some urgency here, because the regulations and the file we tabled before the European Union in 2006 were so bad—and they still are just as bad—that the Europeans do not even want to speak to us anymore. The Canada Organic Office has been sending out e-mails and negotiating with Europe. It did not even receive an acknowledgement of receipt, let alone an answer; the dialogue is broken off.
Personally, this is beyond me. The flexibility in monitoring imports that we asked for was not all that complicated to implement. It was very simple. The request was made well in advance, since we became aware of the new provisions regarding imports that were proposed. These provisions were submitted to the organic industry in September 2008. There were some in camera meetings and we met several times with people from the agency. They refused to grant our request and we are still wondering why.
This will create problems for us when we import organic products. It puts us in a very weak negotiating position with the Americans. The American standards pose certain problems for certain kinds of products. All the directors of provincial associations in the rest of Canada support our position in this matter, as well as our position with regard to export products. Canadian producers and processors are clearly aware of the problems that these regulations will create for them.