Agriculture committee  I think we would like to see the provinces and the federal government come to the table and negotiate an internal agreement on trade that has teeth to it, and repercussions for not following the provisions of that agreement. Specifically in the case of the regulatory barriers that we're particularly concerned about, we'd like to see an agreement that forms part of that, or perhaps a separate agreement where the provinces recognize the food, feed, and environmental safety decisions of the federal government by the relevant regulatory agencies.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. We believe that the ability of any jurisdiction to have arbitrary regulations for reasons other than sound science and risk-based systems is insidious, to steal the word from Mr. McAlpine, and should be rooted out. One way to do that is to have an agreement between the provinces and the federal government respecting the federal government's jurisdiction over food, feed, and environmental safety assessments.

Agriculture committee  I'm going to restrict my comments to the interprovincial barriers that I raised. I think Mr. McAlpine raised labour-related issues, so I think it's more appropriate for him to respond to those.

Agriculture committee  I will answer in a circuitous way, so forgive me for this. I want to come back to a comment that Mr. McCallum made about whether this really is a trade barrier. The fact of the matter is that the World Trade Organization has a series of agreements in respect to regulation. Two of the key ones that we are talking about here today are the agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary measures affecting trade and the one on technical barriers to trade.

Agriculture committee  The ones that we are targeting today and that were the topic of the letter we sent to the Council of the Federation revolve around products that have to go through a food, feed, or environmental safety approval. The barriers we have seen on the provincial and local government side include things like pesticide bans on the urban side.

Agriculture committee  If you look at it in this way, if you have a company that's producing a seed treatment product in one of the provinces and another province decides to ban it, you can no longer provide that seed-treatment product in that province, so then you are creating an interprovincial barrier.

Agriculture committee  I think there's been a series of regulations and legislation that have been reviewed and overhauled since the removal of the monopoly on the CWB. I think that over the past two years governments have done a good job, an admirable job, of creating a private sector marketplace where the industry can flourish, from farmer all the way through to the end processor.

Agriculture committee  I think this is one of the reasons why we decided to write to the premiers and the Prime Minister. We were seeing a trend of provincial regulation, duplicative regulation, starting to increase. It's been an outstanding issue for a very long time. We really feel that now is the time for the provinces and the federal government to get serious about removing these barriers.

Agriculture committee  It's significant that.... I'll use the example of canola, where we really have a world-renowned crop that's Canadian-based. The global hubs for research, innovation, and new developments in a crop like canola are all based in Canada. We have to fight for those research, innovation, and investment dollars, and having a clean regulatory slate that's predictable, where there isn't duplication and there isn't the possibility of having politically driven regulation, is a clear signal to the international community that we are open for business.

Agriculture committee  Similarly to Mr. McAlpine, I would say that we don't have figures on a global scale for what all these barriers would amount to. I would suggest that the figure would be very large. That said, on an initiative-by-initiative basis I think you could drive out figures that would show, for example, recent action by Ontario on neonicotinoids, whereby the industry would have had to put in hundreds of thousands and likely millions of dollars in order to participate in a secondary regulatory action by the province when those products have already been approved at the federal level.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. For those of you not aware, the Canada Grains Council is the peak organization of grain industry interests, representing producers, crop input companies, grain companies, and grain processors. Formed in 1969 to coordinate efforts to increase the sale and use of Canadian grain in domestic and world markets, the council has become the leading recognized forum of the entire grain industry in Canada and around the world.