Mr. Speaker, it is very clear Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada does not fund research on nicotine. We do measure the amount of nicotine in plants in a similar way that we measure sugar in plants. We measure the length of tobacco plants. We measure placement of the leaves on plants, but we do not research in the area of putting nicotine into plants.
Quite frankly those types of measurements are done on all products grown as a crop in Canada.
It is very clear that the nicotine level in plants that have been approved by agriculture Canada, the varieties, has gone down from high levels in the 1980s through the 1990s consistently. The level of nicotine in plants has dropped in Canada.