I appreciate the numbers. Mr. Lemieux says the numbers aren't particularly high, but then again, we're dealing with UPOV 78 and the regime now, and we're about to change that regime. He may be correct; I don't remember exactly who we talked to about that, but I can tell him that we've been talking to people for the best part of this year on numerous fronts when this bill was first introduced at the beginning of the year. They may not all get to committee because you can't get every witness to committee, Mr. Chair, as you know. You do a splendid job with the clerk at getting a good variation, but obviously not everybody can come. That's fair game. It's not only those folks we would talk to; we would be remiss if we didn't talk to others.
There is a concern, once UPOV 91 comes, that having varieties out there that companies own that aren't covered for them necessarily, they may deregister. That's a concern. I'm not saying it's a reality; it's a concern. The nature of this was that if I don't own that intellectual property under UPOV 91, because it's a variety that sits there at the moment, I'll deregister it and I'll bring you a new one. Now I can make money from that one, because I can't make it from this one. That's the concern that farmers have expressed to us, albeit not sitting in the witness chairs maybe, but that's what they're saying. There will be a change in the intellectual property coverage based on this legislation, which will pass; government has the numbers to make it so.
That being the case, that was the concern we heard from across the country, from a number of farmers saying, “Okey-dokey, this is going to be like the pharmaceutical industry. I'm going to change the colour of the pill and I'm going to re-register it and I'm going to get another x number of years out of it. I'm going to put a buffer in it and I'll get something else out of it. I'll get rid of all the other ones where I can't make money, so now you've got to come to me and buy the one because all the others are gone.” That's the concern.
It's not a reality yet. It may not even be a reality, but that is the overriding concern that folks have, that the registrants will simply say, as was pointed out, they can come and ask for it to deregister. Yes, indeed, you'll do due diligence about how long it takes to do that, but ultimately it will be the farmer's onus to actually convince you that there's value in leaving it as a registrant. If they can't do that, you'll deregister it, because that's the process that you have to work with, which is fair. It's not unfair, it's just fair; that's just how it is. It's not something you're willfully doing or not willfully doing; it's simply the process.
That's a concern. For them, this became the safeguard spot, saying, “Hey, just leave the stuff out here. If it's of no value, nobody will use it any more and it'll just disappear, like many other varieties over the years. When everybody stopped using them, nobody cared about them, they let them go, and eventually pretty well everybody deregistered even if they weren't deregistered by not buying them any more. That's what this speaks to, because the system is about to change; that's the concern that they have. This becomes the safeguard. If things don't get deregistered just because somebody decides as a company I can make more money if I get rid of them, that's the concern. No more, no less than that.