Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for joining us today. I appreciate the amount of expertise that we have access to.
Dr. Saindon, I appreciate that you mentioned in your opening comments that your department's focused on novel practices and technologies.
I recently met with representatives from the fruit and vegetable sector. They're concerned with the eroded capacity of the pest management centre as a result of flat budgets and inflation, which supposedly reduced the number of projects they're able to do. As I understand or as I'm told, there's a $9-million budget, mostly from CAP funding, meaning the five-year cyclical round of funding. They're calling for more permanent funding mechanisms.
Over the past five years, has the number of projects that have been funded been reduced because of the factors of inflation and an erosion in funding? Particularly in the fruit and vegetable sector, this kind of research that feeds into the adoption of newer or novel practices and technologies that have a more benign environmental footprint is critical to the industry and to the success of that sector, particularly as they compete with a much larger industry further south.
I'm wondering if you can comment on that interaction between the amount of research being done and the funding levels.