Agriculture committee  Let me give a couple of quick examples of that. I think you currently have more than a dozen, but less than two dozen, federal labs through the National Research Council, and you have a similar number of labs through Agriculture Canada, many of which focus very explicitly on certain crops.

Agriculture committee  When I'm talking about creatives, I'm thinking about individuals, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, and the people who make the institutions and processes work. I'll give you an example of where I think the federal system may be going slightly in the wrong direction. The recent announcements about changes within the management structure and operating system within the National Research Council world are causing a lot of what I regard as the highest value-added and the most creative scientists to say, “You're suggesting I go from a full-time permanent position to a world where I have to go out and raise my own capital to do my job, and it's all going to be two- to five-year contracts rather than a career path.”

Agriculture committee  Yes, I, too, have seen the reports, particularly from the United States and some of the Latin American countries, about herbicide resistance in weeds. As we all know, that's not a new problem; it's just compounded by the much larger acres that are going to a single chemical platform.

Agriculture committee  I think there are two elements. One is that the shortening of the life cycle of grants has increased the cost. It generally takes upwards of a year to put together the proposal and get it through the international peer review. In some cases, the grants have shrunk in size and have been shortened in duration.

Agriculture committee  I'll be really quick. The “valley of death” is not unique in the agrifood world. It's not unique in Canada. It's a universal problem of taking technology into application and use. The agrifood system actually has some very good models that work. The commodity groups, such as the Canola Council of Canada, the Canadian Canola Growers Association, and the pulse growers are very effective as research targeting partners but also as a demand pull into the marketplace.

Agriculture committee  Profit is the bottom line, but what is the source of the differential profit? The source of the differential profit is that the value added per acre has not kept up in the wheat area with the other competing crops, with pulses and with canolas. There's a challenge there. That challenge is partly uniquely around what has been done around wheat.

Agriculture committee  You need science and research into the seed itself and science into the adaptation to and adoption in different production systems and ecosystems. One of the big constraints in many of these product areas is the related science activities, what the statisticians you probably heard from call RSA, which is a major area of investment by the federal government.

Agriculture committee  The short answer is yes. It's happening now in many markets. Is it universal, and is every product uniquely differentiated for end consumers? No, because there's not enough value in some of those markets to justify the full differentiation. For virtually every product line where there are GM crops, there are alternate, competing, differentiated attributes.

Agriculture committee  Yes, definitely. My colleagues and I did a major study of the introduction and adaptation and use of canola. We have currently three main herbicide-tolerant platforms: two that are transgenic; one that is mutagenic. If you take the three of them together, because they're all complementary and competing technologies, that set of technologies has generated—I'm having to grab the numbers out of the air at this point, and I can send you the studies that we've published—I think it was in the range of $1.5 billion of producer profit over a 10-year period, at the operational level.

Agriculture committee  You need a portfolio of research in the context of the agrifood system. I'm always nervous about a grow local food sovereignty model, in that we are a very large producer on per capita terms of many foodstuffs, which we could never consume locally. So we need to be able to access the things we can't produce effectively and efficiently in Canada—bananas, a lot of the tropical fruits and vegetables, and many of the foodstuffs that just don't fit within either our industrial system or agro-environmental system.

Agriculture committee  It's a pleasure to be here for the third time in a year on different issues. Today I'm being beamed in from Vancouver, where I am co-chairing the GM Coexistence Conference. I'll talk about that shortly.

Agriculture committee  Let me make four or five key points. The first is that science, technology, and innovation is, has been, and should be a critical part of federal policy. I think over the last 20 to 30 years there's been a diminution of its role in driving policy options and policy solutions. So I applaud you for focusing in on science and innovation as a critical part of the GF 2.

Agriculture committee  You've asked the big question of the 21st century. How do you normalize science? How do you take all these different ideas and come to some conclusion? There are a lot of processes. There isn't as much diversity in the scientific world as you might think. There's a strong central tendency to believe that so far, the technology as it is used has not generated differential risk in our food system.

Agriculture committee  Let me make two observations. To the first question of whether there is private capital coming in, other than through the large multinationals, the short answer is yes. Most of the crops that are produced in Canada are subject to check-offs. Those check-offs are becoming quite a lucrative cash flow.

Agriculture committee  In some places, yes, it is; in many places, no, it's not. It's not that the regulators aren't capable of doing the technical assessment. In many cases, it's that the legal authorities for them to be able to make a judgment are delayed. They're in the pipeline; they're just not fully articulated.