Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
I'll just follow up on some comments made by Ms. St Hilaire regarding legislation and regulations. You expressed a fear that regulations could undo what's there legislatively. But that's not the way it works: legislation trumps regulation, which means that only a legislative change can undo what is in legislation. Regulations cannot do that. You should be assured that in order to do a legislative change, it has to go through the exact process we're going through right now to bring into effect a legislative change.
The second thing I think I would raise is that you have just given a fairly detailed description of what farmers could do under which conditions regarding their privilege or their rights. I would only offer the caution that sometimes when something is too prescriptive, it becomes exclusionary. When you start listing all the conditions, oh, you forgot about hail. What about drought? What about mould? What about pests? When you become too prescriptive, in fact you become exclusionary, which is not necessarily to the benefit of your members or to organic farmers.
I think the third thing I would simply mention is that I think it's good for everyone to remember that farmers have choice, so if they want to use....This bill is not retroactive. It will not apply to seed or seed technology that's registered and available on the market before the bill is passed into law.
So organic farmers will have that choice. For example, if they are going to use publicly available seed technology, they can to continue to use that into the future. They also have the choice, I would believe, of choosing new technology that is perhaps focused on the organic sector, but it's completely up to them what they would like to do.
I would think organic farmers shouldn't fear that because in the meeting yesterday I was pointing out that my read of the situation for organic farmers is that the organic sector is growing by leaps and bounds. It's a very exciting sector, and in fact by offering better protection to plant breeders....
Plant breeding is not just about GM, as you would know well, I think. There's a host of technology, research, and development that is non-GM that will benefit organic farmers, and even if that's brought to market, because of the increased protection, farmers still have the choice. An organic farmer still has the choice as to whether he is interested or she is interested in that technology or not. This bill in no way constrains them.
I'm wondering if you could perhaps comment on that last one.