Mr. Chairman and committee members, I just want to give you a practical trade example of the sort of thing we're talking about here.
A few years ago, as many of you will know, the pulse industry experienced a fairly high-profile non-compliance on MRLs. The issue was that Canadian farmers were using a crop protection product, glyphosate, fully approved for use in Canada. Our exports were fully aligned with international MRLs, but the EU had never gone through the process of establishing a tolerance. Consequently, it applied a near zero threshold of 0.1 parts per million that we couldn't meet and that caused rejections as well as the threat of product recalls off retail shelves. The next year, the EU established an actual tolerance that was 100 times than the default they'd originally been applying.
We expect to see more cases like this in the future, where regulatory misalignment results in zero or near zero thresholds applied. Among the 12 TPP members, the number of countries that have misaligned MRL lists that are not like their neighbours' is 11 out of 12—or five out of 12, depending on how you define the severity of misalignment—and Canada is part of that. Peru, which is the twelfth, has issued a WTO notification to go its own way.
I just wanted to leave you with that example.