Mr. Chair, again, I'd like to thank the member for the question. I'd like to answer it in two ways.
One is that the pesticide minor use program at AAFC has two components. One is to look at new chemistries, replacement chemistries, and look at the option to use them in Canada. That's usually done through what we call the “label extension” of an existing pesticide, whereby we just expand it to more crops. For that, we have an intake of projects on an annual basis. It varies from 30 to 40 projects a year. There is obviously quite a bit of pressure to handle some of these things. At times, the delays are due to the fact that when we do field research, there is always a climatic component. It's always more complex and takes more time to gather all the data needed, so that puts some pressure.
In terms of developing alternative pesticide management practices, I think the department has just received additional funding of $7 million to deploy new research in these particular fields. We just started a group of 25 new research projects at the beginning of last month on these exact aspects. We have this new research. We have lots of confidence that it will add to a lot of opportunity for alternatives to be developed and deployed with the producers.