You're not going to put that in my time, are you?
It's interesting. We both come from the same Outstanding Young Farmers program, but we're at different ends of the scale when it comes to the different types of production.
As a legislator, my role here is to make sure that Canadians have safe food and food they can afford. When we go through our role of dictating legislation or regulations around food safety, that's foremost in our minds. We really don't care if it's organic or not. We really don't care if it's GMO or not, because science would prove whether it's safe or not. It's hard for me to say, and to hear you say, that we should get rid of all the farmers who grow GMO, just so we can have an organic sector based on market.
Basically you're saying you're marketing organics because you perceive them to be safer. But we have no science-based facts to say that. If we did, we would do that. We, as legislators, would say if a type of food were no longer safe for you to eat.
Then it comes back to what you're really doing, which is marketing a product, and you're doing it based on, maybe, people's feelings, or wishes, or wants. That's fine, that's the free marketplace. But it's hard for me as a legislator to say that I can support you on that, because I can't.
Then I come back to you, because it's going to be really tough as we move forward, as we see more GMO crops and different varieties come forward. Alfalfa is a good example. I can look at GMO alfalfa and probably say it's safe to eat and everything else. There are all sorts of reasons in the organic sector not to do it. But there seems to be no willingness in the organic sector to look at low-level presence, because they are just marketing organic, and the definition of organic can be 90%, or it can be 85%. It's something the industry can decide will be the organic label for Canada, but they seem unwilling to do it.
How do we move forward? Is there any way to move forward? The reality is that GMOs aren't going anywhere. How are you going to survive? The reality is that you're going to be forced to survive with low-level presence. How are you going to react to that situation?