Thank you very much, Chair.
Welcome, colleagues.
I appreciate the witnesses' being here today.
For the P.E.I. potato growers, you made some comments about PMRA and products for plant health or for pesticide purposes. I've introduced a private member's bill, called Bill C-273, the FARM act. It's directed at improving the regulatory circumstances for importing products into Canada from trusted jurisdictions and establishing a regime of these trusted jurisdictions so we could establish a 90-day process to grant a provisional licence.
We know that it takes up to six years to get new products registered in Canada, and at great expense. Even more importantly, there are a lot of products that just simply don't come to Canada because we're a relatively small market, and the manufacturers and inventors of these products will not bear the cost of registering, repeating and duplicating testing. I wonder whether you could comment at all on this.
How important is this to your industry? How important is it to enshrine it in legislation, as opposed to relying on provisions of Bill C-30 to just consider economics in their decision-making?