Agriculture committee  I'll be very brief. I agree with John on the tax credit, by the way. On the point of bureaucracy, I do have a number of grants and contracts. Over the years I'd typically have somewhere between nine and 14 reports a year to write to satisfy different things, and I've had to hire a person to do that.

Agriculture committee  You're putting me on the spot with that one. The question is, should or could the university declare they're going to be the champion? I think it goes to what Bill was saying before; it is a decision that you can make. You can put your resources there. You can put your intellectual efforts there.

Agriculture committee  If I can parse it out, there are two things you're referring to. One is the non-replacement of key researchers, and that can be in either the government sector or in university. I will refer to the university environment because that's what I know. When I was first at Guelph, for the 10 years between 1988 and 1998, we didn't recruit anybody.

Agriculture committee  I'll just talk about my area, because it's a very broad question. In my area, the key thing that people need to be able to understand is how different genetics, whether it's GMO or base genetics, have an effect on what the plant looks like, the traits the plant has. That's the thing that's really difficult to do, and companies are definitely looking for opportunities not to have to do as much of that as they are.

Agriculture committee  I'd like to address a couple of things. On the commercialization front, there are two things I want to say. With regard to my own personal area of research, what we really need is to be really, really good at some things that we're not quite good enough at if we want to attract companies and additional commercialization.

Agriculture committee  I don't have a report, but I could certainly get you the statistics.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the committee for inviting me to present to you. I also want to just briefly mention my background because it has a significant effect on the sort of research that we do. My first job was at Ciba-Geigy in North Carolina. It's now part of Syngenta.