Agriculture committee  Absolutely, because it's for a global population, and Canada is known around the world as having a solid regulatory system in place. It's one of the best in the world, and keeping that system ahead of the other countries is very important. It's a global marketplace, it's globally

Agriculture committee  No. The marketplace will dictate whether there is an economic value. Why would you produce something that is not going to be sold? I think it's counterintuitive that you would spend millions of dollars in research and development to put something out there and hope the world want

Agriculture committee  The question's been asked about three times now. If what you're advocating is a government spend for a massive campaign to support the industry, I fully support it, because I think there's a lot to boast about. We have a phenomenal amount of innovation coming out of this country

Agriculture committee  It's similar to Mr. Anderson's question, and it's a good one: can the government play a bigger role? I think, as in to my previous answer, that we need to ensure that the regulatory system is as competitive as possible. These advancements, these innovations, are taking place at

Agriculture committee  That raises a question that was raised earlier about polls. It's a dangerous place to go when you start to do regulatory policy based on polling. I think polling can help to shape and to understand where people's concerns are, but at the end of the day, what you need to address t

Agriculture committee  Certainly it's bad business to produce unsafe products. You're not going to be around very long if that's what you're doing. That's paramount. You heard about the 20-year experience with the AquaBounty fish, and all the other companies are the same. They take a long time to bri

Agriculture committee  It's a great question. The industry across the country is found in clusters in every single province in every single region. P.E.I. is an anomaly. On a per capita basis, they're more productive from an innovation standpoint in supporting the industry than the U.S. is. They have

Agriculture committee  The role of the government, in the industry's view, would be regulatory. Make sure that the regulatory science is as rigorous as possible. The other parts of it will be dealt with by the marketplace. Investors are the primary decision-makers as to whether or not a product will be

Agriculture committee  Mandatory labelling is obviously a very topical discussion. There are a couple of pieces to this issue. One is that labelling can be done at any point in time. In fact, I looked at a bag of pretzels on my countertop the other day and it says, “Contains no genetically modified o

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you as well to the committee for giving us the opportunity to share our view on this important matter. Thank you very much for this important opportunity. I am with BIOTECanada. As a way of introduction, BIOTECanada is the national trade associati

Health committee  Absolutely, but if you cut out 50% more than Canada does, you save. You just have to figure what that is. In your overarching comment, though, you did touch on the fact that it's an outcome. We need to look for better outcomes. There are a number of different ways to get there. W

Health committee  I don't have any data. I would be hard pressed to come up with an answer to the question of whether everybody has access. I think that, for the most part, most do right now, but that is where the struggle is starting to happen. We start to see what is coming, and the payers recog

Health committee  I think it's a challenge. I'm an employer as well, obviously. We have people on staff and we go through a regular review with our insurance provider, and we see this challenge daily, even though we're only nine people, so I can only imagine what it's like for larger employers.

Health committee  May I comment on that one? That's a great one. I would sound a note of caution when we're thinking about all of this and looking at other jurisdictions, because you're entirely correct, but one of the ways they've done that is limited access. Their formularies include fewer of th

Health committee  You raised for our industry the most important question. Before we talk about what pharmacare is, we are designing something for a problem when we don't really know exactly what the problem is. Is it a coverage issue? Is it an access issue? Is it a combination of both? If somebod