I'm going to leave the answer on the issue of what Canada has not done well enough to Mr. Shrybman.
What I would like to point out here answers your question, I think, but it is in the context of this specific case. What can arise and what may be arising in this case is a situation in which the Canadian government may not be in the best position to defend the interests of a given subnational entity such as a province--say, Quebec--and I'll highlight why.
Dow has invoked the Pest Management Regulatory Agency's re-evaluation of 2,4-D as a reason justifying their claim that the Quebec process has been unfair and arbitrary and unjust. They're saying Quebec has decided that on a precautionary basis they're going to ban 2,4-D for cosmetic use, but that flies in the face of the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency's own re-evaluation. The agency apparently takes a precautionary approach, and it has decided that in fact it can be registered in Canada. They're playing off the federal and the provincial processes. What can happen is that the federal government's own approach to the precautionary principle gets called into question, but they're having to defend the province's own precautionary principle.
I would like to highlight the fact that it's well known that Canada has adopted, on several occasions, a less than progressive stance on the precautionary principle in its international negotiations. In the trade context in particular, there was the EU beef hormones case that went before the World Trade Organization. In that case the European Community argued that the precautionary principle was customary international law and justified its prohibition of beef imports from Canada and the U.S. that were produced with artificial hormones. Canada and the U.S. argued that the precautionary principle was not part of customary international law.
What we have in this case, to bring it back to Dow, is that the Government of Canada has taken certain positions vis-à-vis the precautionary principle in other international fora; now they're having to represent Canada before a NAFTA tribunal, or potentially will have to represent Canada before a NAFTA tribunal, and defend the precautionary principle in a particular circumstance. There's the potential for conflict, and that's one of the reasons groups like Équiterre and the David Suzuki Foundation, represented by Ecojustice, are so keen to be involved in the process. It's because we think we have a specific perspective on the public interest that the Government of Canada may not be able to bring or may not feel comfortable to bring, because it may find itself in a conflicted situation. That may not be the case, but it also may be the case.