Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our guests for being here today.
I think many of us have a great concern about this decision we're here to talk about today. We want to try to sort out what has happened. There have been a number of scientific studies—and I've spent some time going over them—and it's interesting, from what I can see, that virtually all of the use has been within the guidelines that were proposed when the studies were done. They haven't found.... Other than some extreme points, one in the Morrissey study, everything seems to be within the guidelines recommended.
It's interesting that a couple of the studies seem to conclude there might be a problem in the future, but we don't really know what that is. That science apparently hasn't been done as well as it could have. I know the discussion around this started around the loss of the bee colonies and that there was a general sense that might have something to do with it. Science has basically proven there's not a direct correlation there right now.
The Ontario government reacted. You mentioned the words “public pressure”. I don't think they reacted to science. They reacted to public pressure. Now I'm concerned that we're seeing some of the same folks who would have been influencing the Ontario government in Ottawa here, and seeing some of the same reactions.
I want to ask a few questions. One of them has to do with the fact that there's relevant water monitoring data out there. I looked through the Morrissey study, and actually on imidacloprid, basically she found no detection on any of her studies in it. That chemical seems to be ruled out of her study. There's a lot of relevant water monitoring data out there, some of it Government of Canada data, that wasn't used in the assessment.
Can you explain why? Why wasn't a broader use of data used to make a decision?