It's an interesting question. Probably at this point, there are no costs that could be measured, except for the fact that the onus is now on our industry to come to committee and deal with this issue on an ongoing basis, and to communicate with the public on an ongoing basis, when issues like organic foods are raised, and so on.
By the term “toxic” being placed on our products, the onus is being put on us to demonstrate that they are safe, useful, and so on. As long as that “toxic” stigma is there, the onus is being placed on us by the government to defend the reputation of our products.
I want to talk about the difference between the stigma and its management. When we went through the listing process, the government never came to us and said, “We want to list your products under CEPA as toxic because you're not doing a good management job and because there are problems in agriculture because of your problems—that there's something different we want you to do.”
That's the fundamental problem. What is the impetus for us to do things by labeling the ammonia as toxic? There is none. Once the stigma is there, there's no impetus on us to do anything more than what we want to do anyway. It seems to be just an exercise.
I'd like to say that in terms of the constitutional jurisdictional issue, the way a federation should work is that if there's an issue, such as municipal waste water effluent where management is needed, it doesn't seem to be very productive for the federal government to be exercising its jurisdiction through the use of the word “toxic” in the courts. If municipalities across the country don't have the money to build proper waste water treatment facilities, it would be far better if the government brought in an infrastructure program aimed at providing the funds to do that, rather than going through an exercise of going through the science and listing it. Everyone knows we don't want untreated waste water going into the rivers, so let's deal with the problem on a cooperative basis with the provinces.
I see this in many cases of joint jurisdiction where I think the federal government takes the lazy way out by exercising its jurisdiction, rather than working cooperatively with the provinces. That's what needs to be done in the environment.