Let me give a couple of quick examples of that. I think you currently have more than a dozen, but less than two dozen, federal labs through the National Research Council, and you have a similar number of labs through Agriculture Canada, many of which focus very explicitly on certain crops.
The industry and the scientists themselves tell me sometimes it's easier to do partnerships with a private sector company than it is with a lab in the same organization across the street. It's partly the structures of how research outcomes are managed and designed. That's one example.
A second example is that federal programs are increasingly getting more defined about what they'd like to support, particularly the programs under the umbrella of Industry Canada. One of the difficulties there is that they are increasingly carving out the potentially high-return research areas in the agrifood world. So you've got the potential to do it, but you haven't got an ability to put it together.
A third example is that Industry Canada says that even if we do invest in the agrifood world, in many cases Agriculture Canada and NRC are not eligible partners in research grants in the research programs. They can sometimes do parallel things, but you have to sort of do workarounds. So you get into the circumstance where we haven't got enough research. We have really important research being funded by multiple agencies that all come under the umbrella of the Queen of Canada under the federal government, and they can't do anything more than sort of talk across a fence.
Now, somehow getting their parts working together seems to me to be an area that's within the power and the purview of the federal system. If I look back in the past, the successes that the Canadian research community had were when Agriculture Canada, NRC, and other federal institutions worked well together.
We really do work well now in the Canadian context when there's a strong commodity group that can pull people together. So the leadership has left the federal system. It's now residing at the producer level, which isn't bad, but it may be less than fully useful. For example, the pulse growers in Saskatchewan, through the Crop Development Centre and in their partnerships, have been very effective at bringing new varieties to the market. But they've done it almost in spite of the federal funding and management and infrastructure programming.