Agriculture committee  There simply is not the capacity in the seed industry to produce all of our vegetable seeds and to make a profit. Our market is too small. The downside is that we accept varieties that may not be perfectly suited to our climate, environment, diseases, and insects in terms of resi

Agriculture committee  First of all, imidacloprid is a replacement product. It replaced the old organophosphate, organochlorine, and carbamate products that were very toxic to humans. The neonics are considered to have much lower toxicity to the farmers and farm workers. That's important for you to kno

Agriculture committee  Sorry?

Agriculture committee  For vegetable production, the only vegetable seed that's produced in Canada is asparagus seed. All the other vegetable seeds that we produce come from other countries, mainly the U.S., but Holland and Japan too. They are treated there and imported here. Take broccoli, for examp

Agriculture committee  Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong, and occasionally I'm left. Thank you. PMRA sent out a proposal last year for a new approach to doing these reviews. Most of the stakeholders agreed with that new approach, and they did too. They listened to our comments, and they've now

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. Quite simply, the old process wasn't working and isn't fair. The new process, if it had been used, would be abundantly fair because it would give us time for input at the beginning and time for discussion at the end, and then the 60-day or 90-day comment per

Agriculture committee  That's absolutely correct, because when the PMRA bans the use of a product for reasons other than residues in food, they don't do anything about the MRLs. Every other country in the world that continues to use this—like the giant who lives south of us—will continue to use it, con

Agriculture committee  Our farmers would be faced with having to use pesticides that are prone to develop resistance, and so they couldn't rely on them for very long unless they had a broad-spectrum material to alternate with them, because neonics control several different species. The new products ten

Agriculture committee  Absolutely it would be more, and it might not be as effective anyway, but the big concern would be that we would be facing slowly diminishing effectiveness as we select resistant populations. For a farmer, the threat of resistance is a huge problem.

Agriculture committee  The Ontario potato industry has 35,000 acres, and there are about 200 growers of the main crop. The average size of a farm is hundreds of acres. When we lost all effective pesticides to control the Colorado potato beetle leading up to 1995, all we had left to control them were pr

Agriculture committee  Chairman Finnigan, Co-Chair Brosseau, and members of the committee, thank you very much for this opportunity today. After almost 30 years with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, 18 years working for the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association dealing with pesticide i