Let me just go back a little bit in time to when Monsanto was going to bring in its Roundup Ready wheat. The farm group I was with at the time told Monsanto that it was a really bad idea, that it would cause too much market disruption. As a result of a lot of concerns raised in those marketplaces, it was withdrawn.
At the end of the day, they can't bring something forward if the farmers don't want to grow it, and the farmers are adamant that they don't want it.
When we talk about the uncertainty and you say you're going to do a market assessment, I guess we have to ask whether it's going to be real or whether it's just going to be the minister asking one of his senior staff people to do a quick survey and then sign off on it or whether it is Ag Canada doing it.
What if, in your marketplace, there's one country that says they don't want it? Is that enough to negate it or not? If it's a small country like Zambia that says they don't want GM wheat and the European Union says they do, does that stop it? There's a lot of uncertainty around what is actually meant.
This issue probably will come back again for further discussion. I think it needs to be thought through a lot more, because if we want people to invest in research, and if they can't be relatively sure how the process will work at the end of the day—what assessment actually means—then they're not going to invest here. They will take their resources and invest in Australian wheat breeding instead of Canadian wheat breeding.
That uncertainty is what chases people away, and that's what gives our farmers concern, because we want that innovation and those research dollars being spent here. It's quite uncertain to us exactly how all of this would have worked.