This is a good point, and I reflected on this issue yesterday. If there are fewer public programs and a diminished ability to train people within public universities or Ag Canada systems, we will eventually have a diminished capacity to do private plant-breeding work.
In our own situation, we've used a couple of plant breeders. One was a retired Ag Canada plant breeder; he made the initial crosses on this new variety. We have one fellow from Pakistan and we have one guy from China—really good people, but we just don't seem to be able to find the same type of quality locally.