Agriculture committee  Mr. Barlow, I don't have anything direct on fertilizer. We did, however, commission a team of economists when we looked at our area, which is, of course, crop protection products and biotechnology. If you took those away, you would raise the food prices of Canadians by $4,500 a y

Agriculture committee  I would just add this very quickly: How do we make Canada an innovation hub? How do we attract that investment and have it happen in Canada? To your point, climate change is going to drive a great deal of research and development in agriculture. We think it should be taking pla

Agriculture committee  Perhaps Ian has some thoughts, but one of the things we talked about in our opening remarks was Canada and promoting our resilient agriculture and taking that technology out there. We are a sustainable supplier. I believe that, in Canada, about 8% of our greenhouse gases are ge

Agriculture committee  I'll let fertilizer answer fertilizer questions. Our concern is on access to innovation for crop protection products. As discussed with many members of this committee, we're concerned about where the current PMRA transformation may be heading. We're concerned about a very broad,

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, committee members. My name is Dennis Prouse, and I am the vice-president of government affairs for CropLife Canada. My colleague Ian Affleck, our vice-president of plant biotechnology, is with me. The issue of global food insecurity is one that

Agriculture committee  I was just going to say, Mr. MacGregor, that on the things we're talking about, there are a lot of very small companies. I don't want anybody here to have the impression that we're just talking about large multinationals. A lot of the examples Mr. Affleck gave are very small star

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, sir.

Agriculture committee  I was going to say that this product-based system served us well for an awfully long time. There have been 125 novel traits approved in Canada since about the mid-1990s. We're 125 for 125 on safety on that. We haven't had one turned back yet, so it works well. It just simply need

Agriculture committee  That's correct.

Agriculture committee  I would just expand on that, Mr. MacGregor. I think it's about creating a regulatory environment that's able to respond quickly. These technologies now allow for new traits to be developed in much shorter times than before. That's why we risk falling behind unless we make those c

Agriculture committee  I was going to say that there is a private labelling system that's available now for consumers. In our view, that works well. We think we'd be heading down the wrong road and contrary to what Health Canada's policy has been by moving to a mandatory system.

Agriculture committee  I was going to say this conversation with government actually dates back to late 2014, I believe.

Agriculture committee  Yes. Ian is very fresh off some thoughts and some discussions. Ian, I'll let you take it from there.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I would say, Mr. Blois, really quickly, that's why we're so passionate about this subject. Canola is ours. That is a triumph of Canadian agriculture and Canadian biotech. The regulations that were first in place in the mid-nineties allowed that industry to flourish. Now they

Agriculture committee  I'm actually going to punt this question over to my colleague, Ian Affleck. Ian is our vice-president of biotechnology, and he's had direct experience with a number of these products.