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 cert

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

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 platf

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 ha

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

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 c

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 he

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 wher

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 com

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

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

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 centra

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

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