Similarly to Mr. McAlpine, I would say that we don't have figures on a global scale for what all these barriers would amount to. I would suggest that the figure would be very large.
That said, on an initiative-by-initiative basis I think you could drive out figures that would show, for example, recent action by Ontario on neonicotinoids, whereby the industry would have had to put in hundreds of thousands and likely millions of dollars in order to participate in a secondary regulatory action by the province when those products have already been approved at the federal level. Also, then you're going through a whole other regulatory process. That's just the cost to the industry.
On top of that, then, I would suggest that the governments would have duplicative costs that they would have had to have borne in order to go through their regulatory process, despite the fact that the federal government, the relevant regulatory agency in this case, has already deemed the product to be safe.
I think there's a lot of duplication and cost just in the process. On top of that, then, you would have costs associated with companies having to create whole new market scenarios for Canada because you have one jurisdiction in the country that treats their product in one way here and then another jurisdiction over there that treats it a slightly different way. You're starting to have a fragmented marketplace, and and there are costs associated with that.
We don't have a global figure per se, but I think in studying this further the committee could drive out costs on an initiative-by-initiative basis.