Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And through you to the witnesses today, thank you for coming. It's been a very interesting conversation today.
I wonder if I detect some regional divides in the conversation. Like Mr. Young, I represent an urban riding, and my constituents are alive to the bee and neonics issue. I was asked to attend a grade 4 class at a local elementary school recently because the kids had a petition to give me to present in the House of Commons on this very subject of pollinators and the neonics. Each of them had written letters for the minister; some of them painted bee stripes on the back of their letters. I split them between the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Health, and have asked for a response on the issue. When I go to the farmers' markets in the summer, people also stop and talk about this issue a lot.
I think all of you touched on the issue of public confidence in the act, and I think Mr. Petelle, you talked about certain groups undermining confidence. But one of the interesting things about the neonic thing and the bees and the pollinator issue more generally is that although the claim has been made that this is a very rigorous science-based regulatory process, different jurisdictions looking at the same science have reacted very differently. I want to use the neonic thing as just a case in point. It's even within Canada. Ontario just recently has restricted the use of neonics on 80% of, I think, soybean and corn crops.
Do you guys detect a lack of public confidence or trust in this regulatory system, and if so, to what do you attribute that?