Thank you, Mr. Amos and Mr. Séguin.
In addition to the statements from Équiterre and the Council of Canadians, the committee has received submissions from Meg Sears, Ph.D., from Dunrobin, Ontario--these have been circulated--and from Industry Task Force II on 2,4-D research data; and from Dow AgroSciences.
We also have a statement to be read into the record from Dow AgroSciences:
Dow AgroSciences wishes to thank the members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade for their invitation to appear. While we recognize that activities and testimony at committee falls under the banner of parliamentary privilege, because we are currently engaged in litigation with the Governments of Canada and Quebec, in the interests of prudence we must respectfully decline appearing before you today.
In our absence we have provided a written submission to the Committee which outlines our position and which we ask you to consider in your deliberations. If we could kindly highlight one theme, it is that Dow AgroSciences fully supports the responsibility of Canadian governments to establish effective regulations to protect Canadian's health and safety and Canada's environment. Furthermore, we believe that Canadian governments have a responsibility to enact effective health and safety regulation that follow established science-based risk assessments/risk management principles.
Should there be questions related to our submission, we would be pleased to address them in writing. Thank you for your consideration.
That's from Dow AgroSciences Canada, Jim Wispinski, president and CEO.
I think all of those submissions have been distributed to the members of the committee.
This is an interesting topic. We've heard from our witnesses, and we're now open to questions. We're going to begin the questions with Mr. Brison, and we're going to try to limit the first round to seven minutes for questions and answers. So I would ask the witnesses to try to keep their answers commensurate with the questions and try to keep them all within seven minutes.
Mr. Brison, please begin.