On the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, we understand that the difference between Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is that one of the key elements for agriculture is that the competitiveness, or the economic impact on farmers, is not part of something that PMRA has to take into consideration. We feel this is leading to some decisions that are imperilling farmers because we're losing products that we need in order to manage the crops. That's a big concern for us.
We see some differences in how PMRA and EPA look at re-evaluations in particular, and that could be streamlined a bit by doing a little more upfront work before there is a proposal. A lot of times now we see proposed decisions, and they're coming out almost weekly, that say “Eliminate all uses, no matter what.” That's a huge concern and then we go through a lot of work, and then PMRA may say, “Continue but you can only use it three times a year instead of 10 times, like you could before.” Maybe you can make that work if you lose one product, but then if you lose two more fungicides and get those same types of results, you really cannot manage in a bad year with blight or something. You don't have the tools there, so that's a big concern.
You've probably heard this before, but we also compete, then, with products that come in from the United States that have been using those same products. So that's a real blow.
I'll turn to agricultural research and knowledge transfer, and those two things really need to go together. That was our third aspect. For us, we have benefited from the use of cluster programming funds across the country. We've worked together with our processors, with our packers and growers, to come up with a national priority through potato research. We've funded those—we put our money in as well—but the demand for the whole program was too big so we didn't get everything we were looking for. I understand a lot of commodities are in the same category. We think that type of research will help keep the farms competitive and we'd like to see more funds there.
If we just do the research and we don't get it to the farm level, we've lost opportunities. That's a big part of the research. We really feel that knowledge transfer needs to be directly funded with some new models. Again, we're willing to participate in what that might look like. I don't have the answer but we do think there is great research in some cases. In some cases maybe the researchers don't have a 100% grasp on what the farmers really would need, and there is a bit of a gap there both ways.