Agriculture committee  If you get into the labelling thing, it's a slippery slope for how far you can get down into it. I think it's about education. I generally don't believe you should be able to label something that's....

Agriculture committee  Having taken part in those consultations, I guess the one question we were left with was this. There's an increased emphasis on the environment and environmental sustainability, which we're very much in favour of and also on the public trust side. The only concerns we had were th

Agriculture committee  Not on the government side, at least that I'm aware of, but definitely on the research side; for example, every provincial beekeeper will get together, a group of apiarists. But often we find that, when we do have government to government at the provincial level reaching out, it'

Agriculture committee  I'd like to add really quickly, I think you're starting to see a push-back on social media from people who are recognized as experts who are pushing back against bad science. That's happened very organically. If we, as an association and our members tried to do that, it wouldn't

Agriculture committee  I think the key is to not reinvent the wheel but to funnel into organizations like Agriculture in the Classroom, which we're also supporters of. They already have the infrastructure built. I would suggest that when this policy is developed and there's a budget allocated to it for

Agriculture committee  From my perspective, I think it's a chance for the government to come out in favour of science, innovation, and the food available on grocery store shelves. It's easy to talk about innovation in the cellphone industry or the car industry, but it's still taboo to talk about innova

Agriculture committee  It's absolutely critical. Basically where the innovation is in agriculture, at least on the plants side, is all delivered in that tiny seed. The way I like to describe it, the seed is basically the microchip that makes your computer work. It's the Intel processor. When you put it

Agriculture committee  When you're talking about educating, it's obviously jointly federal and provincial, but throughout, courses such as food nutrition, which is something that was still around when I was in high school, are not around anymore. If you want to get it into education, you have to do so

Agriculture committee  It's a big question, so I'll do my best. I think, writ large, the concern we have is that you have policies, like those outlined in the budget, about increasing agriculture and agrifood exports that would come from, say, the second-largest net exporter, but then you have a simi

Agriculture committee  Seed companies are in the middle of harvest, too.

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair, honourable members, on behalf of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, or CSTA, I'd like to thank the committee for your invitation to discuss our perspective on the food policy for Canada. Before I make some comments, I'd like to just quickly frame up who we are and

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. Dominic Barton's report has been talked about a lot at this committee. He talked about living in China, and he said that there was never a concern unless there were food shortages. That's when there really was concern. Geopolitically, I think there are a lot of pol

Agriculture committee  I think the one advantage that Canada has is that our regulators are respected worldwide. We have some concerns with PMRA, but PMRA is among the other two or three pest management or pesticide regulators in the world that are actually respected for their science as well as our ag

Agriculture committee  Right now in Canada, the only biotech crops that have really been commercially available are canola, almost all of it; corn, the vast majority; and soybeans. It was higher, but there's actually an increasing market for non-GMO soybeans for Asian markets. The only other GM crop th

Agriculture committee  Yes, absolutely. That's also why we prefer the multilateral, so we can do a one-off. I think the TPP was a big step forward toward addressing non-tariff trade barriers at the outset.