AGRI Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND AGRI-FOOD

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'AGRICULTURE ET DE L'AGROALIMENTAIRE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, April 30, 1998

• 0847

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Joe McGuire (Egmont, Lib.)): Let's begin our meeting this morning.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this is a study of biotechnology. As committee members know, some time ago we decided to have our own investigation into biotechnology and where we'd like to see the industry going and have some input into the biotechnology strategy.

So on the Library of Parliament information booklet that you all have, it's broken down into four different sections, one for each of the next four committee meetings. Today we're looking at, on page 2, the public policy directions for biotechnology.

With us this morning we have the president of Acadia University, Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie.

Welcome.

He will get the study launched for us. He's been in business, I guess, since the creation.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Many years ago he was into molecular studies and DNA.

Could you take it from there, Doctor?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie (President, Acadia University): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

With your permission, I'll use some slides to illustrate.

The Chairman: Certainly.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: While I'm getting this ready, I can say to those of you who are the elected members here, when you really want a political challenge, come join us in universities. That's where the really vicious politics are. You will have some preparation from your current experiences for that, but—

An hon. member: We had some this week.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: When you read the Globe and Mail this morning, you'll know why I refer to that.

What I would like to do, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, is give you a bit of an overview, if I can, of the background with regard to biotechnology, and perhaps bring you into the nature of modern biotechnology and prepare you somewhat for the remaining experts you're going to have for the presentation.

• 0850

What I have here on the screen is just a couple of definitions. First of all, technology is the application of science to the production of goods and services. Biotechnology then is a subset of the whole area of technology. It's the application of the life sciences or living systems to the production of goods and services. It's really a relatively simple thing.

This slide is a photograph of a relief of an ancient Egyptian tomb. This was carved around 2500 B.C. What it would show if you could see it is that on the top relief would be the harvesting and grinding of grain. In the middle is the transformation of that grain into bread, and then the bottom relief is the making of a fermented spirit, beer, from grain.

I show this simply to point out that living organisms have been used for thousands of years to produce goods and services. Yeast is involved in the production of bread and is used in the production of fermented spirits. It's a living organism.

Living organisms have been used to produce goods and services for thousands of years. If that's the case, then what's all the excitement about biotechnology today? In other words, if biotechnology has been around for hundreds of years, why the excitement or sudden interest in biotechnology today? That is because of our ability to make relatively rapid changes in living organisms, and I'm going to take you through a couple of examples of that now.

This is a schematic of a living cell. I've taken some liberties here, but this is a basic schematic in which we have a living cell, let's say a bacterial cell. I've shown only a part of the genes. Every organism has a set of genes that tells it what to do. That green circle over there represents a set of genes, DNA, which carries the information that tells the cell what it will do. Each of those segments would carry the information to tell the cell to do something or make a particular product.

In this case the information is copied in the form of that black strand you see in the middle. That's a copy, let's say a photocopy, of the information carried in the DNA genes. It's called a messenger RNA. It takes a message from the gene and goes out and sits down on the workbenches of the cell. Cells have workbenches that carry out the work of the cell. They're called ribosomes in the jargon, but they're really the cell's workbenches.

This message sits down there and tells the cell what to do. Largely it tells it to make certain proteins, the proteins that will protect the cell, keep it going, help it reproduce itself, just like all of our cells. The major molecules that look after us in our cells are proteins, and proteins are the products of the genetic expression in living organisms.

Now, the excitement or, if you like, the interest or the concern has come from the fact that scientists have learned how nature deals with changing its own cells, its own genetic make-up. Scientists learned how you could use the cell's own machinery to cut those genes open and splice in a new gene, a gene for a characteristic that the cell didn't have before. What I've shown here is a cell with the genes cut open and a new gene, the red gene, spliced in.

Scientists can do this using the very cutting tools that nature provides itself. Nature does this itself. Scientists have learned how nature does that and so have learned to use it very specifically to cut open a cell at a specific point and put in a new gene. In that gene a messenger RNA will be made, a message will be made from that gene, and it will go out and sit down on the cell's workbenches and tell the cell to make the protein that corresponds to the gene you put in there.

• 0855

So let's think about what gene you might put in there—human insulin. Before biotechnology came along, anybody who had human insulin dependency diabetes required insulin to be extracted from human cadavers in order to be injected into them in order to save their lives. Today, scientists have learned how to splice the gene for human insulin into bacterial cell genes and to have the bacterial cells produce human insulin. In fact, in North America today, the only human insulin that is allowed to be used is Humulin, produced through biotechnology. Because, of course, when they used to have to extract the pancreas from cadavers they could extract other diseases from the organism. So this is a highly specific way of producing pure human insulin.

This is an example of biotechnology, and these were the kinds of things that were done in the early 1980s that created the great excitement in biotechnology.

You may have heard of something called recombinant DNA technology, which is a very fancy-sounding term. All it really means is the introduction of a gene, regardless of its source—that is, whether you make it synthetically or whether you obtain it from another natural source—into a living organism.

This is a photograph of E. coli bacteria. This is essentially a big production of those cells, which I described schematically earlier. If one of those cells was a bacterial cell and you reproduced it through fermentation, you would get a whole mass of these cells. You would have a big fermenter full of them and your fermentation tank would be producing human insulin. So little bacterial cells are really protein factories now producing, after genetic modification, human insulin.

These are two children. The one on the left is two years older than the one on the right. The one on the left suffers from human growth hormone deficiency, a serious problem that affects a noticeable percentage of the human population. If it's untreated, the individual does not have a normal life expectancy.

Here's Tom Thumb, probably one of the most famous pituitary dwarfs with P.T. Barnum. The bone structure doesn't develop properly, organs don't develop properly, and it's not just a question of being short; your life expectancy is probably 40 years, in that vicinity. If human growth hormone is injected into these children from a very early age, they can achieve nearly a normal growth expectancy. Their bone structure and organ structure will develop properly and they will have a normal life expectancy.

Where would you get human growth hormone? Again, you would only get it from humans who have died. So until biotechnology came along, the only source of human growth hormone was extracting the pituitary glands of human cadavers.

With the technology I just described, you put the gene for human growth hormone into an E. coli bacterial cell, you grow it up in the fermenter and you produce human growth hormone. And that's where human growth hormone is obtained today.

This as an example of one of the areas that human growth hormone is used for treatment. These are some of the early uses of recombinant DNA technology: human growth hormone, human interferon, human insulin, and vaccines for hoof and mouth disease and pig scours in the agricultural area.

I'm going to brag just a little bit here. This is a Maclean's magazine, dated June 16, 1980. They did an article on the emerging biotechnologies at that time, and of course one of the key things was the ability to be able to make human genes. And you needed to be able to make them fast, so you needed a machine to make them that came to be known as a gene machine. This is a picture from that magazine article, and this is a photo of the first gene machine ever to successfully produce a piece of DNA in the basement of McGill University in 1980.

Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood—Assiniboine, Lib.): My, you've changed.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I've matured.

Mr. John Harvard: What does this say about your genes?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I'm holding that off until after.

• 0900

This is the machine that was the first successful DNA/RNA synthesizer, a gene machine produced by a Canadian company called Biologicals in 1980-81. It was the forerunner of the machines used around the world in every laboratory today.

Let's come a little more closely to agriculture. These are individual cells from a potato plant. You can actually take any portion of a plant today and break its structure right down to the individual cells. And each of those individual cells has all of the genetic material necessary to make a whole plant.

In this case, if you take one of these cells out you can grow from it a whole potato plant that looks just like the original. All you need to do is to take the cell in the top part of the slide and add a few nutrients that tell the cell to start reproducing itself.

Down at the bottom in the red we have a whole batch of potato cells that have reproduced from the original. They are at this stage undifferentiated, that is, they don't know what they are in terms of a specific part of a potato plant. They simply have all of the information to make a whole plant. In order to get a potato plant from a mass of these undifferentiated cells you have to tell some of them to start becoming stems and others to start becoming roots.

So you add some nutrients to the undifferentiated plant cells and from that you start producing the stem and leaf portions. You would then add more nutrients and have other cells become the root structure, and then you would plant it and it would grow into a potato plant.

In these slides, every three rows in certain of these plots have been reproduced from individual potato cells from an individual plant. You would ask yourself, why would you want to do that? If you go into your garden and you find a humongous potato plant, you don't want to have to go through years of developing enough seed to have a commercial crop. Today all you have to do is take a leaf from it, reproduce it in this particular way, and you can produce thousands of copies of that plant in a single growing season.

Here's a slide of work done in Saskatoon. Cassava is an extremely important plant around the world. This is an example of the use of the technique I just described.

All plants in nature are subject to disease. The plant on the left is obviously a diseased plant. In the growth of any plant the fastest-growing tip of the plant...and probably the easiest one to think of conceptually is the strawberry plant. At times of the year it grows like crazy. You could almost watch it grow.

The cells in the fastest-growing tip are usually free from disease. So if you take some cells out of that tip and reproduce them, you get a disease-free plant.

The plant on the right is a fairly healthy-looking plant, and believe it or not, it was obtained from the plant on the left, using this particular technology. Dr. Kartha in Saskatoon, as many of you know from your visits, has done some of the finest agricultural research in the world, and we as Canadians should be extremely proud of it.

This is simply a crop of full-grown cassava plants. Their tubers are used for starch, the structure for building materials, and the foliage for nutrients for animals.

I know you can't see it very well, but what kind of plant do you think this is? It looks like a poplar, doesn't it? Here it is a little closer up. It's not a poplar. It's a McIntosh apple tree.

You see, nature is always producing mutations. One of the mutants discovered in one of the orchards was one that grew virtually straight. Through the cloning I've just described, it was multiplied extremely rapidly, and you can imagine the value of this. It is almost more valuable in the domestic market than in the agricultural market, because you can grow these things as a hedge in your yard instead of using up a lot of space to have your own apple orchard.

Mr. Murray Calder (Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, Lib.): I have a question. You've changed the DNA chain in that plant so the tree itself grows like a pencil, basically. What about the structure of the apple itself? Is that the same?

• 0905

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: That's a very good question. The first thing I want to say about these is that nature changed it. Scientists didn't change this one. This was a mutation in nature.

One of the things I want you to remember is nature is changing all the time. Nature is always producing mutations. This was a mutation that people thought would have commercial value, so they cloned it—that is, they multiplied it—through the technology I just showed. But scientists didn't create this one by changing the genes themselves. Nature did that.

The apples, to the best of anybody's determination, are exactly the same as the McIntosh apple growing on any McIntosh apple tree. It's only the structure of the frame that is different.

Does that answer your question?

Mr. Murray Calder: Yes. When we get into questioning, I'll go a bit further.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Now, coming to the place where scientists could have made the mutation, this is a cell. The thing in the middle is a cell from a tobacco plant on the end of a pipette, and on the left is a syringe that a scientist is about to use to inject into the nucleus of that cell a gene that the tobacco plant doesn't already have. Scientists grow a plant from that single cell. They hope it will have the genetic characteristic from the gene they injected. The reason scientists learned to do that is here is nature doing it itself.

In the lower right is a bacterial cell. Those bottle-like things lined up on the surface of it are virus particles and they are injecting into the bacterial cell their own DNA or RNA. That will cause the bacterial cell to reproduce those viruses. So nature itself knows how to inject genetic material from one organism into another.

Here's another example from the plant world. Here's a bacterium that you've probably heard about already, agrobacterium tumefacient. It carries a set of genes.... See, I wasn't fibbing about round genes. On the right of this real bacterial cell there is a set of genes, a circular array. This bacterium is capable of injecting one of those genes into plant cells, and when it does, it causes the plant cells to grow rapidly.

You've all seen cancer. The crown gall or the big lumps on a tree is tree cancer caused by this kind of an organism transferring its genes into another plant. Nature is doing that. This is where scientists learned how to be able to put genetic material into organisms. They learned from nature.

Remember what I said earlier. This particular plant is the kind of plant the whole world needs. This is a tobacco plant that glows in the dark. Obviously that's just what the world needs.

In the experiment I just described, in order to prove that scientists could put genetic material into plants, they injected the genes for luciferase. You all know what luciferase is; you've all seen fireflies. Fireflies contain this gene. When it's in the presence of a certain chemical called luciferin, a chemical reaction occurs. When the chemical reaction occurs, they release energy in the form of heat or light. In that case the release is light and you see the firefly sparking at night. When it's sparking, it's trying to attract a mate, but the reason for it is a chemical reaction.

Scientists put the gene for luciferase into the plant cell, grew up a whole plant, poured luciferal on it, and it glowed in the dark. This meant that luciferase, the gene, was in all of the cells of this particular tobacco plant. That proved that scientists could do this and you would then go on and put other genes into other plants.

For example, if you could put drought resistance and frost resistance into highly valuable commercial plants, then you would have an enormous advantage for agriculture. Scientists have learned to do that. You can make plants, such as strawberry plants, more resistance to frost damage by putting the right genes into those plants. These are issues you'll probably hear much more about with subsequent presenters.

Here's a little rascal, the type of beastie that causes agriculture enormous losses. This is a tobacco hornworm. What this little rascal doesn't know is that just before it was put on this leaf, the leaf was sprayed with a bacterium that I know you've all heard about, bacillus thuringiensis, Bt, and it died very quickly because Bt is toxic to caterpillar type insects. The reason is that it carries a gene that makes a protein that is toxic to those insects. If you could take that gene and put it into the plant itself, then the plant would be toxic to the insect and you wouldn't have to spray with the herbicide.

• 0910

Here is an example of the damage done to spruce in Canada through the spruce budworm. You all know about the enormous damage there and you know how expensive that is. Bt will kill spruce budworm. If you could transform spruce plants with this toxin, they would be resistant to the worm.

Here's proof of that. Here are two tomato plants. The one on the right was grown from a cell that was injected with the gene for Bt toxin and the one on the left is normal. They were both infested with caterpillars. The one on the left was destroyed. With the one on the right, the caterpillars went up to about the second leaf structure and then took off. They left it alone. So you don't need to spray this plant; the plant is already resistant to that particular kind of insect through biotechnology.

You will say there's concern about doing that. Here is one of our very famous Nova Scotians, Howard Dill. Howard Dill is known for his giant pumpkins. Howard didn't just go out into his pumpkin patch and find this, yet I'm sure many of you and most of our citizens have celebrated Howard Dill and his achievements. Howard Dill went around transferring genes from selected plants into selected other plants. He took the pollen from certain plants and transferred it to other plants selectively, trying to get the genetic material from plants he wanted to get together to produce ever bigger pumpkin plants.

The only difference between what Howard Dill is doing and what I've just described is that Howard Dill is transferring thousands of genetic characteristics, and in the samples I've just given you're transferring a single, controlled genetic characteristic. That's an extremely important feature for you to remember. Biotechnology allows you to control absolutely the genetic characteristic you are moving around.

Today you can move genes into animals. In the case of cows, you can have the animals produce proteins in their milk that will cure human diseases that simply can't be produced in any other way. There are protein molecules that are so big that science can't yet make them in a commercially viable way. If you can transfer the genes into a cow or a goat, the goat or the cow will produce those proteins in its milk and then you harvest the milk and from the milk you extract the product that will treat human disease.

You can do the same thing today with plants, and maybe you will hear more about that as well. Plants are becoming very useful in producing very important protein or drug materials, often with very heavy carbohydrates.

Early in the 1980s there was a fear that this technology was going to get carried away and you would have the plant people producing humongous plants like giant carrots, which of course would be used to feed the giant rabbits that the animal biotechnology people were producing. Of course, we know that wasn't the sort of thing that was occurring.

There are interesting things that have occurred. Here's a geep. A geep is a product of the fusion of a fertilized cell from a sheep and a goat to give you an animal that isn't naturally produced in nature and is incapable of reproducing itself, but that has the characteristics of both of those animals. It could conceivably provide very specialty food markets if that turned out to be the case. It's an example of the kind of things that can be done in agriculture.

Canada is a world leader in many areas of biotechnology in agriculture. Here's an example of another aspect of biotechnology for which Alberta producers are world famous. That is the ability to improve the herd quality of a whole herd of cattle in a single season by causing an elite cow—by elite, I mean one with characteristics that you want to reproduce—to super-ovulate. Then you fertilize that animal artificially with the semen from a superior bull, flush the fertilized eggs from the original mother and transplant those fertilized eggs into host and inferior cows. You have the host cow bring to term an animal that is the product of the original mother and the original father.

• 0915

Up in the left you see a mother in the middle who has produced all of those offspring in a single season. Obviously she wasn't quite that busy herself, but the fertilized eggs were removed from her and transplanted into other host cows, and they produced cattle that are nearly identical one to another. You can see that you can take these and freeze them and transfer them around the world to produce herds of superior quality very quickly.

Biotechnology is something that has to be used with care and some knowledge. Even in these areas there are certain things that are required, but there are also things we can imagine that simply aren't possible today.

With that, I think I'll leave my presentation and be prepared to answer any questions you might have.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Dr. Ogilvie, just for my own clarification, you're saying that because nature is doing this in a natural way and we've been doing it for thousands of years with living organisms, there's no problem doing it in the biotech way, mechanically. It's faster, but it's really basically no different from what we've been doing for the past thousands of years.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: In principle, that's exactly what I'm saying. Nature has been transferring genes from one organism to another probably since time began. Scientists learned how nature was doing that and have learned the techniques of doing it in the laboratory. What I've tried to do is just summarize exactly what you've said.

The Chairman: Okay. And we can take that to any length that people will offer?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Not at the present time. The limits today are transferring a single gene or a few selected genes from one organism into another and having them function properly or, at the other extreme, mating species using whole organism transfers. Scientists are not yet able to transfer more than a small number of the genes that are known in nature, to do it deliberately, and to have them incorporated to produce an effect that they want. I expect, Mr. Chairman, that as time goes on humans will ultimately have the capability of doing whatever they can today imagine.

The Chairman: One thing the committee will have to deal with is the ethics of biotechnology. As you know, there are a lot of people who don't agree with it at all. There are some countries that don't agree with it at all. Europeans are very anti-biotechnology or products that are produced from biotechnology. That's why we're asking the questions. We have to deal with this at some point in our deliberations and I'm just wondering how far we can go without getting people too upset.

There was a great outcry in Canada with rBST, for example, which is basically reproducing artificially what the cow produces by itself. You know what we went through there. It's not approved in Canada for use yet. This whole thing is very exciting, but how can we do it in such a way that people will understand it the way you do?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I think that is indeed the challenge we have as a society, to be able to take advantage of the advances that occur in ways that benefit us without leading to the side opportunities that could be very destructive to us.

• 0920

One of the things I think you should remember with regard to biotechnology, as opposed to some of the other major events of the last century such as nuclear energy and so on, is that in the area of biotechnology the scientific community itself, in advance of the capability of doing certain things with biotechnology, got together and developed rules and regulations to govern how the technology would actually be used.

In this case, not only does society as a whole have a genuine interest in the way biotechnology is used, but the scientific community itself is banding together to develop rules that would allow the technology to be used only under very carefully controlled conditions, such that in each step along the way, the knowledge of what the impact would be would be as well understood as possible before it would be able to be used in any wide kind of manner. That started in the late 1970s. The famous Asilomar Conference ultimately led to the rules and regulations that most countries have ultimately adopted as their national policies, in terms of how the technology would be used.

The Chairman: What kind of rules are you referring to?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: There is a series of guidelines in terms of how the actual genetic manipulation, if you would like to use that term, can be used in a laboratory under extremely controlled conditions until it's well understood. Then it can only move from the laboratory into carefully controlled testing plots and then, a long way down the road, into the environment only after it's gone through a series of extremely stringent hurdles and reviews. These are basically the rules that govern scientific experimentation in Canada, the United States and most countries.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Before we go any further, I apologise for not introducing you, Margaret. Margaret Gadsby is the director of regulatory affairs of Biotechnology North America and chair of BIOTECanada. Welcome also, and I apologise for not introducing you earlier.

We'll go now to Mr. Hoeppner.

Mr. Jake E. Hoeppner (Portage—Lisgar, Ref.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, gentlemen. It's very interesting.

I farmed for 35 years before I got into this other life. I want to talk about canola a bit. I was one of the first canola producers who used MCPA in the control of mustard in canola and was quite successful, just by observation—you know, what volunteer canola would do. As you know, talking to one of the senators yesterday...you probably cannot freeze volunteer canola. Frost will not damage it to a point, but with seeds you need a very light frost.

Does this plant experience something like what you showed—that natural mutilation or injection? Does that make the plant frost resistant? Also, you have volunteer canola in grain. It's very hard to spray it out. It isn't susceptible to your sprays. Is there a connection in that, or why does that plant behave that way?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I don't think I'm the one to perhaps answer. You have another expert here who's probably much more knowledgeable on the details. Perhaps I'll deal with the general aspect and then Margaret can answer the specific.

There are a lot of differences, of course, between how seed behaves at the stage where it is seed and germinating and how a whole plant will survive various conditions once it's fully grown. There are plants that have genetic characteristics that make them resistant to frost and drought, for example. Those characteristics can be transferred from one species to another to improve it.

To come to the general issue of how you get rid of a weed—and a canola plant you don't want growing is a weed—biotechnology is starting to deal with that by putting genes into, let's say, wheat. I'm speaking theoretically here, and again you'll get specific examples. Scientists could put a gene into a wheat plant that would make the wheat plant resistant to a herbicide that would kill the weed. You could then spray the crop with a much lower level of herbicide and only kill the weed and not touch your plant. Or for weeds that are very resistant, you can increase the level of spray of a herbicide quite substantially to ensure that it will eradicate the weed, knowing that it won't affect the major plant, the crop plant that you're interested in.

• 0925

So genetic engineering today is transferring genes to plants that make them resistant to herbicides.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: Okay, I can see that. But I think the Europeans have some concern, and maybe they're wrong and we're right, but what amount of that toxicity carries over into the seed? Let's say in a canola plant, you can breed a plant that will be resistant to the flea beetle or something like that. That toxicity must carry over into the seed to be transferred into next year's plant.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Mr. Chairman, I know a general answer to that, but we have a real expert here on these things, and I wonder if you would invite Margaret to respond.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: Gladly.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby (Director, Regulatory Affairs, Biotechnology North America; Chair, BIOTECanada; AgrEvo Canada Inc.): You're going to be hearing much later in the series of speakers from the regulatory folk, and I think when you get into detail with them it will become clear that the issues you're raising are very real issues and that those are very much part of what goes on in the safety assessment.

So, yes, there's a legitimate, logical, scientific concern, if you're using a pesticide on a plant that has been modified in some way, to be wanting to know what the chemical content of that plant is, the chemical content that occurs naturally and the chemical content that might have come through any pesticide exposure.

This is very much the kind of thing that's looked at in the data package, and until we, the industry, can prove that the answer is a good one on behalf of the consumer, then our products will not be registered. We have to answer those questions, and I think it speaks highly of the Canadian system that's been developed that the Canadian system is very highly integrated so that it's very clear who is doing what in looking at which portion of a very complicated safety assessment.

One of the challenges I think Europe is facing right now is that they haven't integrated the pieces quite so well, and I think that's why they tend to get more questions in the media, tend to get more concerns raised. But in fact their safety assessments do the very same things, cover the very same aspects of jurisdiction and are just as stringently covered as our own are.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: Getting to another issue, my brother is a doctor and we have some heated battles over this biotechnology issue. He claims that now that we're at the point where we can transfer genes to improve or to design a plant or an animal, there is a problem with wild genes tagging along and transferring something you don't want, and that some of these genes that will tag along are very hard to detect.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: Again, that's a very real concern, and one of the things I think Dr. Ogilvie clearly pointed out is that, through biotechnology, the advantage is to be able to identify the single points of change you're introducing. He's made it sound very simple, and you could imagine it's really technically quite complicated, to prove what it is you have, to prove that you have nothing else associated with it.

In our language, we call it going to a gene library. And you could imagine that if you're going to a real library and you really want to read one paragraph of information, if you're like me you end up reading a little bit before and a little bit after, and therefore you've incorporated into your brain a little more than you might want at the end of the whole process. And so really what we try to do with biotechnology is to make sure we have looked at the series of pages we've extracted from the library but we've only dealt with the single paragraph, and we'll check to make sure that we didn't accidentally insert the other information along the way.

• 0930

It's a very real concern, but there are precise technical ways that you can be sure you haven't done anything more than you say you've done.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: As you know, a lot of the research is done by multinationals in cooperation with universities or with government agencies.

We heard during the BST debate the question of how accurate the information is that we sometimes get. What would be your suggestions as far as making this information public is concerned? Instead of getting half the story to the public, the whole story gets out so the public can make a conscious, objective analysis of what is really happening. We heard testimony that was quite variable on how open these experiments are and how well the information is put into public domain, because some of it is under closure or protection for 30 or 40 years.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: The issue of regulation is one that is ultimately in the hands of regulators, but we have an enormous amount of experience in this country and in all other advanced industrialized societies in terms of regulating the pharmaceutical industry today. When you come through the process to have a pharmaceutical product on the market, the industry is required to provide you with full details on the way in which the drug is produced, full details on the clinical trials that have been run, and the results of those in terms of convincing the regulators in the end that this product should come to market.

From my own perspective as an individual, I see no reason that the same degree of scrutiny should not be required with regard to a product going into the agricultural sector, into the food chain, or anything of that nature. In other words, I'm saying to you I don't see why the regulatory process should not require a full and open presentation before the regulator before the product is allowed on the market.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Madame Alarie.

[Translation]

Mrs. Hélène Alarie (Louis-Hébert, BQ): Welcome. I appreciated the fact that your presentation was easy to follow. I'm someone who benefits on a daily basis from the insulin that is manufactured by small bacteriological plants. I can therefore appreciate what biotechnologies have to offer.

I have a question for you. Why is it that the medical world easily accepts the evolving field of biotechnology when it comes to humans, whereas it is less ready to accept the benefits of biotechnology when it comes to the plant and animal world? Why is it that it has trouble selling this to the public? An unhealthy fear prevails. Is it the fear of making a mistake? I can't explain it. Perhaps we are not explaining things and procedures in a way the public understands.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: That's a very good question. I think there's a difference when we face a medical problem since...

Mrs. Hélène Alarie: We don't have any choice.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: No, we don't. We are only interested in an immediate course of treatment. Consider all the illnesses that a person can contract during his or her lifetime. However, in the case of food, it's a little different. Food is a necessity and during the course of the day or even a lifetime, we have time to think about what we're going to eat. This doesn't require an immediate decision, unless we are starving. The need for food is not immediate, no more than the need to resort to biotechnologies to feed people is immediate. In the event of a genuine food shortage, we would look much more to technology for solutions.

• 0935

Mrs. Hélène Alarie: Even though Canada is a land of plenty, food supplies are not secure in every world country. As you stated, some countries are suffering from shortages of food. We are always confronted with this dichotomy. On the one hand, we have the technological means, through biotechnology, to ensure abundant food supplies, but on the other hand, we can't manage to make this a reality. Surely you have asked yourself these questions. Do you have any suggestions for us?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I don't have the perfect answer. It's a matter of making some progress. In my view, we have to start by implementing a system and adopting regulations which will reassure the public that technology is safe and generates extraordinary benefits, not only in terms of our food supply, but also in terms of our economy, our lifestyle and the future of our country. If the regulations are clearly defined, we can move in the direction of technology and through experience, the public will acquire faith in the numerous benefits that biotechnology has to offer.

Mrs. Hélène Alarie: Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Margaret, do you want to elaborate?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: I would like to make one comment because I think it's a very good observation. Perhaps there's one thing we haven't mentioned here. I don't think the Canadian public understands traditional food products in terms of how they are derived, how they are judged to be safe, and what efforts go into making that assessment. They're not really comfortable understanding how they can trust the tuna sandwich they had yesterday, but it's a little more difficult, I think, to say that I've done something to that tuna sandwich that they may not quite understand because it's highly technical but they should trust me because it's okay today.

I think we still have a big communications effort around the whole area of food production in this country. Most of us don't understand any more where our food comes from. Most of us don't understand how it's safe and how we know it's safe. To come in with very technical and exciting opportunities through biotechnology is great, but we really do have to educate people. You have to start with what's traditional. I don't think you can start with high tech.

The Chairman: Murray Calder.

Mr. Murray Calder: Kelvin and Margaret, you just hit on one of my pet peeves, and that is basically education. Consider the perception of the public right now of the fewer than 3% of the population who are actively involved in agriculture growing food. Their perception of Jake and me, for instance, is that we're these rustic beings that bounce around on a tractor wearing a straw hat and with a piece of hay hanging out of our mouths. That's the farmer.

Then all of a sudden, we in the agriculture industry start talking about how we have the capability of maybe cloning a hundred Jakes over there.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: I hope not.

Mr. Murray Calder: Maybe the Reform Party might be happy about this, but it's a problem for us.

All of a sudden, their perception of the agricultural industry is absolutely destroyed, and they're scared. This is something they deal with three times a day: in the morning, afternoon, and night. So they want to know. Quite frankly, when I see some of the kids now, as far as they're concerned, their milk, eggs, chicken, and whatever else comes from the grocery store.

My question is what vehicles are available right now today so that we can become involved in this education process and bring the public up to speed? They're obviously not there. Also, what vehicles should we look at establishing to get rid of a problem that is going to become more and more immense all the time as the population itself is increasing? Biotechnology is here to stay.

• 0940

I remember when I graduated from high school in 1970 we were talking about how we were going to feed five billion people on the face of the earth by 1995. Well, we're at six billion right now. Now we're asking how we're going to feed nine billion people by 2030. Obviously biotech is part of this. That's what got us to this point and what will get us to the next point. How do we educate, and what vehicles do we use to bring the public up to speed about what we're doing and let them know the food is safe?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Your question has no easy answer, and I'm sure you know that.

One of the things that disappoints me most is that during my lifetime Canada has held probably a pre-eminent position in agricultural research in the world, but we've really held our success under a basket. We didn't brag about it. We didn't recognize the benefits of it.

These developments occurred through research, and much of it through federally sponsored research in the agricultural research stations around the country. In my own home province of Nova Scotia, several of the world's leading varieties of strawberry plants were produced in Kentville, Nova Scotia. This country didn't derive a single penny of revenue from those because we had no plant breeders' rights or patents on plant materials. Consequently, Canadian society has never had an evolutionary educational experience in terms of the enormous value of agricultural development and the impact of research in bringing about those agricultural developments. Therefore, it is somewhat conditioned to the idea of scientific research leading to changes in agriculture that are of enormous benefit.

Many Canadians have some degree of feeling that we've done something marvellous in canola, but they have no real understanding of what that really is. We've lost an enormous opportunity to build up the background cultural education and experience that show us that agricultural research really isn't just a person with a straw in their mouth driving the tractor. It's pretty serious stuff, and it's been that way for 40 or 50 years in this country.

We have to start making sure we recognize that agricultural products developed through research are of enormous value to our country in many ways, including economically, and they have to be protected. We now have a plant breeders' rights regulation in this country, but in my view it doesn't go far enough yet and it's nowhere nearly as good as a patent on plant material.

We have to understand these things in terms of the impact on the economy. Then we have to move to develop regulations with regard to agricultural biotechnology that are appropriate, well articulated to the population, and clearly shown to work in terms of the evolutionary development of the applications of biotechnology in the marketplace. Then we need to have a high degree of constructive public relations education in terms of the continuing role of agriculture to us as a people and our economy, and the value added to that and the value added to the quality of life through agricultural research, which includes genetic engineering.

I haven't said “Do this tomorrow and it'll change” because I don't believe there is anything we can do tomorrow to make it change. But we have to recognize these key elements and move on all of them.

Mr. Murray Calder: Given that, I can use an example here, and part of this answer has to come from the scientific community itself. The farmers went out this spring to put seeds in the ground. Everybody saw the tractors out in the field, and this was normal. But if I told people that most of the farmers right now are using the GPS, the global positioning system, and explain it to them, those people would say, “Wait a minute, when did that happen?”

• 0945

So the perception of the public is here, but in reality agriculture is there. The question then is how do we close this gap to bring the public up to speed without shocking the hell out of them?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: We have to recognize, as you have recognized, that the education of the population is a required part of what we are doing. I think the government has a role in that. It seems to me that most people in a local community would be quite excited about the fact that the farmer is using the global positioning knowledge not only to know when to plant but when to use various applications of fertilizers and pesticides to not only enhance the productivity but reduce the bio-load, the danger to the environment through the overuse of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers—because many of these people are using it in their bloody fishing boat when they are out there on the lake, right?

Mr. Murray Calder: I couldn't agree more. I gave you that example for a reason, because that's the bright side. The dark side is if I start telling them that I can inject a hormone into cows to increase milk production, they're going to say to me, “What does that do to my milk?” If I tell them that we have changed the genetic structure of the potato plant to kill the Colorado potato bug, they are going to say to me, “What did that do to my potato?” So there is a balance here.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: The industry is not a unified body—in fact, by law it can't be—but I think if I had a master plan I sure wouldn't have introduced biotechnology into agriculture through certain of the products that have caused the most problem. I have always thought that if electricity had been brought on an unsuspecting world through the electric chair, I doubt that we would have hydro wires running around all our countries, because people would have seen it in a very different light. If an electrocution in a electric chair had been the first demonstration of electricity, I think we would have a very different kind of situation.

I believe if we hadn't had the milk hormone, the BST and such other issues we have looked at, if we had come in through the idea of transforming plants to make them resistant to pests so that we didn't have to spray the country with pesticides, my guess is the population would have had an enormously different view of biotechnology if this were the first major issue that had hit them, because there would have been the opportunity to explain it entirely from the constructive point of view without the other kinds of concerns.

Furthermore, as I was trying to say a little bit earlier, but maybe not so well with my limited capability in French, I think the more direct the issue is to going down our gullet by choice, the greater degree of concern we're going to exercise on that until we have been made absolutely certain that it is safe.

Mr. Murray Calder: The bottom line is the fact that as the population increases, agriculture is going to become more and more intensive. The bottom line is they don't make land any more.

The Chairman: Thank you, Murray.

Just to piggyback on Murray's statement, we were told yesterday that the objective of the department is to double the value of our agricultural industries from $20 billion to $40 billion by the year 2005. All our arable land is basically being used now; in fact, we are losing it every year to urban development. Yet we're going to double our production and the value of our products. So the only way to do it is to grow more potatoes.

Larry, you're on.

Mr. Larry McCormick (Hastings—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair, to our witnesses. I'm sure we'll see you both here again, along with many other people.

Doctor, when I hear people's concerns about biotech, the fear of the unknown, I really want to be able to play a very small role in helping explain and to put some of their fears to rest—fears that are perhaps not unfounded.

• 0950

Of course, today what we often hear about on Main Street is the rBST. We've been using biotech so successfully for 50 years, as you say, it's part of every segment of our lives.

You may have already given it to me, but do you have a KISS example of how we can tell a biotech story to display where a gene is transferred? I had it quite well explained to me in Saskatoon one day and I was quite assured we're controlling all that. But how can I give a KISS example of a product the public might accept and believe is done safely?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: I don't think it's an easy thing to do, but if one were determined to do it and put the resources and energy into it, one could do it.

Margaret gave a kind of indication that there are analytical scientific tools that can be brought to bear, from the fully scientific point of view, to demonstrate very clearly that, as she put it, the right paragraph has been used and only that paragraph, and that is all that has occurred down the road. But even scientifically, it is not a simple thing to do.

However, if one goes through the various scientific steps from taking the original plant, transforming it genetically through means I've discussed this morning in a very simple way, analysing the product of that transformation, and following it through several life cycles of the particular plant—in this case, before it is released into the environment—there is a series of very public awareness kinds of things that can be done, and indeed are done, in each of the plant transformations that have been done to this point. It could be described very well to the public, particularly if the public had an interest in the specific product you were dealing with.

Whether it's the tomato plants that are resistant to the bloody grubs in their home garden or something of that nature, you need to use as your example something the average person can relate to very quickly. They just aren't going to relate to rBST. I'm sorry, but as a scientist and a citizen, I don't believe that one's easily winnable through the kinds of arguments that are going on today.

In order to help society understand this technology and its final implications in the way you've described, we need to choose plant product species that relate well to the general consumer, and for which we can clearly articulate the steps that have been taken to show that the end product is as safe and healthy as any other, and there is no long-term worry about changes to the environment as well.

Mr. Larry McCormick: Yes. Thank you.

And just in case the chair cuts me off here, I have a question for Margaret, or comments. It's not that I expect her to know everything here, but she's a most learned person, and also you, Doctor.

On the rBST, since it's been put on the table, I'm just wondering what's happening in the United States. How are the consumers accepting the product? I've heard you can legally label the product rBST-free in the United States today. I think it is questionable how good the labelling would be. Would we even expect IC, or whomever, to be able to label it if such a product came to Canada?

I'll leave it at that for the moment. Thank you.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: The simplest answer is that rBST in the U.S. is well accepted. There were some ideas early on that milk consumption rates might change. That has not been seen. As I understand it, the marketplace for rBST-free-labelled materials is very minute.

• 0955

In the Canadian labelling policy we do have the ability to label anything on a voluntary basis, based on the presumption that you can actually prove your claim is valid. In a lot of commodity production in a lot of bulk food handling and bulk food processing, that's not a small challenge. Because of the way the food collection systems are designed in order to provide high-quality, low-priced food items for a diverse public, we don't have a production system that is really readily amenable to separating materials off from the mainstream without an added cost.

In general, when you talk to consumers, you'll find they're interested in a lot of things. If you ask if they're willing to pay more, they frequently say they're willing to pay more, but when you offer the product and it actually costs more, they don't demonstrate what they said they would do at the cashier's wicket. So we have to be aware that there's sometimes that dichotomy between what we say as human beings and what we'll do with our wallets.

The Chairman: We're running out of time here, Larry. We have to go to Mrs.—

Mr. Larry McCormick: Doctor, it may be very unfair to run this by you, but we've heard questions at this table concerning the research on certain products such as rBST and the fact that much of this research is being done by companies that stand to gain immensely from this. Is this much of a challenge in the industry? Is it usually done quite fairly? Is this a situation that occurs or doesn't occur often?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Well, industry is one of the major supporters of fundamental research in most areas of potentially economically valuable products in any area of technology today, and certainly that's true in biotechnology. I don't think for a minute that means the vast majority of industrial research is suspect in any kind of way.

Once again, we're the victims of specific examples. With the tobacco industry out there, the public is enormously sensitized to potential problems with the use of research information and so on. So, again, I can't give you a blanket, “No, there's no problem. Everything is fine and wonderful.” Once again, we have to be certain that in licensing any product that comes through a biotechnological development in industry, the regulations are appropriate and the basis on which the final decision is made is as open to scrutiny from the beginning to the end as it is in the pharmaceutical industry.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Mrs. Ur.

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur (Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

With the next round of WTO negotiations coming up and the concerns exhibited by European colleagues, how are we going to face those challenges as to the way they are receptive to biotech? Also, regarding tobacco—and I don't know the right terminology—I think I've read somewhere that tobacco appears to be the right form or a plate that is used as a base to do biotechnology through. Am I right or am I wrong on that?

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Well, the interesting thing is that many of the things we least like are the ones we know most about, either because they're sinful and society has a great interest in them so we spend a lot of time on them, or for some other reason. Tobacco of course has been a major commercial product for a long time, and an enormous amount of research has gone into understanding the tobacco plant. So it's an extremely useful reference plant to carry out a lot of basic research on. That's why I used it as an example. We know a lot about that particular plant.

That's the reason the mouse is used in many animal experiments. It's not that we need a bigger mouse. It's that the mouse is a highly understood animal system, so it's easier for scientists to know very quickly what is the impact of any change they make in its genetic make-up and what the consequences will be.

So I don't think there's a worry from that point of view, if that was one of the aspects of—

• 1000

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: I'm not worried either. I'm a past producer, so I—

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Okay. It's an ideal model as long as we understand that this is what it's been used for: a model.

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: Exactly.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: The issues with Europe are really quite interesting. During the time I've been involved with biotechnology—I get the sense it's beginning—the Europeans have gone through several cycles on what their view will be in terms of licensing, patenting, and approving biotechnology products in both the health care area and in agriculture.

I think I'm correct in saying that today, generally speaking, in agricultural approval we in Canada are ahead of them; in the pharmaceutical area we're behind them. So the thing that is of interest to me is that in the human health care industry they're quite advanced with regard to what they're prepared to approve. This relates to an earlier question about attitudes and so on. But in agriculture they've taken much more specific areas of concern.

My expectation is that given the enormous economic impact of advanced or elite plant materials, particularly through the Dutch economy and indeed sectors of the German economy and so on, the Europeans will develop in the end a very pragmatic approach to what they're prepared to allow in terms of biotechnology products. In fact, they are well ahead of us in terms of their regulatory protection for new plant species and so on.

I'm not at that table, so you know far more about what the political aspects of these issues will be in the end and what the international negotiating strategies are and so on. I guess I'm a little more optimistic about where it's going generally.

I was just about to say to Margaret that she will know from the industry perspective.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: The shortest answer to your question is that at WTO I think they'll lose. They don't have a scientific basis. They're adding more and more layers of science. But every time they add another layer of science, the experts weigh in by ratifying the decisions that have already come out of North America and Japan in favour of these products. They have created a lot of political hurdles, and I think there's a certain amount of economic protectionism that's really at the basis of that. There are some environmental concerns and a great lack of consumer comfort. I don't think that at WTO they'll really have a leg to stand on.

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: This is really important. This is maybe good strategy for biotech—I'm not saying this to be funny, I'm serious—where you could bring people on board regarding biotech.

You see the interesting developments. I was sharing this with my colleague earlier. If you could do something with grass, the season is here. You could do something regarding the cutting of lawns. Where are we at on that? That would be an approach such that it might be something where you could sell people that biotech isn't that bad. You could kind of go through that avenue.

Dr. Kelvin Ogilvie: Well, that's a really great example. You've probably got some specific changes here. A wonderful company in Alberta came on the market a few years ago and it had a very short lifetime. I know a lot about that because I was a consultant for a company that almost bought the rights to this grass, which was developed at the University of Alberta. It grew extremely verdant, but only so high, and then it stayed there forever. Nature is producing those very kinds of grasses, so the industry is interested in this. I think some of those products are already coming close to the market and you're going to see it down the road.

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: Good.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Rose-Marie.

Just to conclude, I'd like your opinion on this article that appeared in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen on the canola revolution. It's called “Specialty Seed Crops Set to Jump-start Local Agri-tech Industry”. There's a Mr. Hardy, who was organizing some farmers around Winchester to have a speciality canola crop. It goes on to say that Mr. Hardy isn't the only one who has seen the future of canola and thinks it looks good. It says that the organization has also attracted a multinational biotechnology company willing to supply the farmers with its carefully bred canola seed, and a multinational farm chemical company is interested in crushing the canola to produce this specially modified oil.

• 1005

A number of articles have been written recently on multinationals actually taking over the food industry through biotechnology. I wonder if you have an opinion on whether that is something we should be taking seriously here, that the multinationals will, or can or could?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: We could probably do an MBA thesis on restructuring in the industry and whether that's good, bad or indifferent.

Yes, there's reoganization going on in the food production value chain today. Why is that? Probably at a big picture level it's because we insist on cheap food. So everywhere in the food production system the margins are tiny compared to what you can make in banking or in a lot of other industries that are driven on resources. The margins are much higher there. So consolidation is inevitable when you have tiny margins; it's the only way to be able to add margins on.

The Chairman: But if there's a small number of companies controlling the seed, it's not cheap any more. The food might be cheap, but the seed isn't.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: That's the whole problem, though. As long as you're saying that the end product, the food, is cheap, then the inputs have to be highly controlled in order to leave anything in the farmer's pocket at the end of the day, and the processor's pocket at the end of the day, and all of the people in the food distribution channel at the end of the day. So integration is going to happen because that's the nature of the margins in the business.

Is it bad that multinationals are involved in biotechnology? Speaking as a multinational, obviously I don't think so. Sometimes I don't think people realize it's a natural outcome of what has been done.

You will hear over the course of your various testimonies how rigorous the Canadian regulatory system is. I think as Canadian taxpayers we can be proud of that, but it certainly does not err on the side of being very little intrusive. It's an expensive proposition in risk assessment. It's very intense. It's very costly. In order to get through the regulatory hurdles that been created and have been determined to be appropriate, you need to have big bucks behind you. You need to have risk assessment experience behind you.

Why are the chemicals and multinationals doing well in this area? Because we're used to living in a regulated environment. We're used to putting risk assessments together. We know how to do it cost-effectively. The little seed companies that are five-man operations have a really difficult struggle trying to get through the regulatory burden that has been placed on them.

I'm not saying it's inappropriate, but it's a reflection of the system we've created. So I think the people who are going to be successful in the short term are the ones who have the dollars behind them to go through those pretty high hurdles. I'm not suggesting those hurdles aren't appropriate, but it will have an outcome.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Doctor, for coming this morning and getting us launched in this inquiry.

Margaret, you're going to stay with us?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: Yes, I had a presentation but I don't know how we're doing on time.

The Chairman: Mr. Atkinson has a presentation also. Who wants to go first? Margaret, do you want to go first?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: How are we doing for time?

The Chairman: We have 40 minutes, actually. There's another committee coming in here at 11 a.m., so we're going to have to be quick. We started a half hour early and we're still behind.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: What I thought I would do for you today is to try to give you a bit of an overview of who AgrEvo is and where we come from. And I think maybe that'll give you a different view on some of the opportunities in ag biotech from what you've heard in terms of some of the problems that keep landing on your doorstep, as opposed to some of the successes.

• 1010

I'm going to try to highlight some things that will be a little different to this story from the stories that perhaps you've heard from other companies before.

AgrEvo is a joint venture company of two big German pharmaceutical and agricultural companies. The interesting part of the AgrEvo story is that we're a European-based company. Most of our biotech innovations came out of labs originally in Europe, but largely because the regulatory environment in Europe has not been supportive, those products came very, very early in their development to North America and have been developed and commercialized here first.

So it's kind of a strange thing. You can imagine what that does in my corporate boardrooms, when on the one hand I'm the success story and I'm not the German.

As we go along I'll try to point out what that has meant in Canadian dollars and Canadian jobs. This is the kind of story where we have to realize what kinds of opportunities are there for the future.

Just briefly, the kinds of products we're looking at today have agronomic traits. The kinds of things you see are herbicide-tolerant crops and some male sterility programs that allow us to create hybrids for the very first time in some crops. If you're a corn farmer you know that corn hybrids have been available for in excess of 20 years, and since there have been corn hybrids, the opportunities for yield enhancement have just been tremendous.

Well, biotechnology has brought us hybrid systems in canola for the very first time ever. So we're looking at yield enhancement possibilities today of 10% to 15%, in very short order probably higher than 20% to 25%, and our corporate goal is to break that 40% threshold in canola yield production. That's because we have a hybrid system that comes to us courtesy of biotech.

You've heard a little bit about Bt. We all know Bt is one of those insecticides that's very useful in the toolbox, and I think we all realize that by putting some of these insecticides in the plant itself rather than spraying them out on the larger environment, that gives us new selectivity options. But we also have Bt that comes from various parts of the world, from various types of bacteria, and has very different modes of action. So, again, by playing with different kinds of Bt, we can add to the tool kit and add to the opportunities for rotation. And as long as we have opportunities for rotation, the chances of resistance building up and us losing one of these items out of our tool kit can be avoided. We also have several mechanisms of fungal resistance.

Some of the kinds of things that are coming are more what we call value-added traits. It's great to hear the kinds of ideas you all have, and in a sense we all sit in bars regularly and think up great products, and you think, why couldn't we have had that as the great product, to be the first one? We all know that R and D is a little bit fortuitous, and R and D also has to go by steps and inches before it can take great hurdles.

So, yes, it would be great to have turf grass that has limited growth capabilities and limited seed-head production capabilities so we wouldn't have to be out there with our lawns so much. But in talking about that, you're probably talking in excess of 35 traits that you all want to be in that grass plant. That's a lot of changing to do. We have a lot of discussion today about whether adding one to five traits is a good thing, a bad thing, a manageable thing, if we understand the safety, if we don't.

So a lot of what we see today in the products we have is the fortuitousness of easy traits. The herbicide-tolerant traits are some of the easiest things a company can come up with. They're single traits. They're dominant traits. They're easy to track. They're things with which you can put a safety package together for a relatively limited cost and send it around the world.

• 1015

But look at when we get into turf grass, which has 35 traits. Then there's broccoli, which has more antioxidants so it's even better at fighting cancer, and it has an enhanced vitamin package and it's pest-resistant and it's frost-tolerant. You can imagine that we have great expectations before us. These are things that the industry really wants to do. As you can imagine, we see the money in those opportunities, but we have to get there slowly.

I think one of the things we did was a disservice almost to ourselves and biotechnology. Sometimes we focus so much on the future that people don't want the products of today, they want the products of 15 years from now. Unfortunately, if we don't have today's products, we'll never get there, so we have to go by inches.

But in value-added traits, there will be a lot of things enhanced: oils in oilseeds, enhanced nutritional factors, cancer-fighting agents, these nutraceutical kind of properties that you've got a whole speaker on later in the session, and things that make it easier for the processor to get out of the crop plant what it is that he is trying to get out of so that he doesn't always have to use the harsh chemical processes that he has to sometimes use to create the food products that we want and those benefits for consumers.

As I said, if we want nutritive content or fibre content to be changed or we want something that's going to have a health benefit for consumers, these are all very complicated multi-gene combinations. That's certainly where the industry is going, but we have to realize that we're still here today.

Maybe, in the interest of time, I'll just skim through some of these so we can talk a little more on the conclusions rather than the operating principles.

Again, who the heck is AgrEvo? Who am I? Where do I get my opinions from? Basically, as I said, the products that came from AgrEvo came out in 1989. They left Germany. They came here to Ottawa to the plant research centre here. We worked here in a collaborative arrangement.

So basically what I'm saying is that prior to 1989, AgrEvo/PGS had zero employees in Canada. Our first employee was a German, who we got in with the immigration policy basically. Then we started hiring some technicians to work around him here in Ottawa.

As the canola projects got off the ground, we moved them out to Saskatoon, where he could collaborate with the canola breeders out there. We added more people. We added breeders. We added more technicians. We added people on other research projects also in canola.

The short answer is that today we have over 55 people in very high-tech jobs, and we have openings. We've been looking for a lab manager for our R and D facility for over a year and a half. We looked offshore. We're close, I think, finally, but these are high-tech jobs in a burgeoning area, which is, I think, some of the excitement you saw in Saskatoon.

Interestingly enough, the canola we registered in 1995 was the first agricultural product of biotechnology that was registered in Canada. It was also a corporate first for AgrEvo. It was the first AgrEvo product commercialized worldwide. We see canola as one of the areas that we at AgrEvo/PGS intend to have dominance in. Clearly, if we intend to dominate it, then we intend to be very big in Canada.

Interestingly enough, again, Regina is our headquarters for North America. We have over six Canadians there who have responsibilities throughout North America. I'm responsible for the registrations in the U.S.A. and Mexico, in addition to Canada.

The rest of this slide was for a presentation in Washington. You don't really need to know what we're developing for California, but we play around the world. Personally, I've been very involved in getting our clearances in Japan because canola is exported. As you know, about 50% of our canola on an annual basis is exported and about 85% to 97% of that goes to Japan. We've made great progress with the regulatory system in Japan. We're very involved in other parts of the developed and developing worlds.

• 1020

I'll just tell you something here on this last point. It was for a different presentation, but it's a question that often comes up about multinationals and how do we ever share benefit with the people around the world who aren't in the same financial position that Canada is in, people who don't have the abundant food supply and the low cost. There's an association called the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications. This is an association that's global. Basically it is a brokerage house. It tries to make liaisons between developing world needs and first world technology holders.

I can say that AgrEvo, Monsanto, and Novardis are all very involved in ISAAA. We all have projects where essentially, for a pittance of a cost—the token dollar, if you will—we give licensing rights or patent rights for certain kinds of projects for use in the developing world. So for things that would cost you millions of dollars if you wanted a licence to sell them into the United States, we are giving other opportunities around the world at a much reduced cost. AgrEvo's projects are in Vietnam and we're also involved in trying to develop regulatory expertise.

The message there is that, yes, I realize there's a certain number of people who consider “big” and “bad” to go in front of “multinational” in a list of adjectives. But I think most of us do understand our responsibilities and we are doing something. Maybe if you're interested in more, you should ask more what it is we're doing instead of assuming we're not doing anything.

I think what I wanted to spend the time on, if I can, is to just whip through some lessons learned. As you can see here, we've been playing in biotech heavily in Canada since 1989, and we've been around the world. I was in Frankfurt arguing on public perception with Germans and how they should go forward on their communications strategy. We have learned some lessons.

One of the things, as an MBA thesis example, is that there is nothing like ag biotech. The speed of uptake of this technology is record-breaking. AgrEvo could have sold out of probably five million acres of seed every year. We don't have five million acres of seed. Yet if you look at the uptake in Canada of agricultural biotechnology on the crop side, it's minuscule compared to the speed of uptake in the United States. You can't get the two on the same graph, because Canada looks like a spit.

One of the things that I think we've always worried about was, when we go into these high-tech production systems, are we going to get to a point where farmers can't handle it and are we going to be asking them to manage complicated situations that they really won't have the wherewithal to manage? I think the fact that it has been taken up, and that the rate of complaints and the rate of proper use of these tools has been very positive.... Clearly, we have figured out how to talk to farmers. They aren't the guys in overalls; they're pretty high-tech guys. Most of them, if they're still in business today, are pretty sharp businessmen. So if you lay out what it is this agricultural production system does, how it works, what they have to do, what it means they can't do, they'll take good notes and they'll do it.

Mr. Murray Calder: As a farmer, I agree.

The Chairman: Margaret, we'll have to conclude pretty soon.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: Okay. What we need to do, as was mentioned a couple of times, is work on our consumer dialogue. Our consumer dialogue in North America has been very good compared to the rest of the world. I think we have to take credit, but it doesn't mean that we have to sit on our laurels. We still have work to do there. As I said before, I think a lot of the problem is that we don't have a good understanding of what traditional food production is all about. It's a bit of a hurdle.

• 1025

We need to deal with the issues of speed and volume in the regulatory system because we have a lot of products coming. What we have today is but the tip of a very exciting iceberg. We don't have enough resources in the regulatory units to be able to deal with that volume, so we really have to be pragmatic and make sure we staff up appropriately, or find some way to share work with our international colleagues. We've done that historically in the area of toxicology review for pesticides, so if we can come up with good work sharing arrangements and mutual recognition, we can get there.

One of the problems we have today is that the life of some of our agricultural varieties is so short and the world is so competitive, it takes too long to get regulatory clearances globally. Our system in Canada is very good. We can get clearances, if we have all the data, in about six to nine months. But in some places in the world it will take you three years to get a clearance. When you trade in international products, you can imagine what that does to the opportunities for trade.

One of the good things we've seen, as we've gone around the world and different experts from different countries with different points of view and different perspectives have looked at that package, is that everybody has come to the same decisions over and over again. I think it's been a good exercise, but as an exercise it has to stop and we have to find some way to get some utility out of this instead of duplication.

Just to sum up, this really is a time of opportunity for us. We in the industry are very excited by the possibilities. We're very involved in trying to help make the Canadian biotech strategy a better one, because we see that this is an opportunity that will either make or break us. Right now we are a global leader. I know that's not something we're used to saying as Canadians, but we are. It's not something that's on the horizon; we're here. We're in the top three. We don't do that very often, so we should be proud of it. We didn't do it by cutting corners; we did it with a very rigorous regulatory system. We've been a good steward. That's why the world is looking to us.

Now is the time to go forward, though, and recognize that we can keep on winning. People imply sometimes that if you win in a global competition you've somehow sold your soul, done something wrong, or must have cut a corner. We didn't. We're here. We have to keep holding onto that leadership, and that means we have to capitalize on things like the Canadian biotechnology strategy and do the right thing.

The Chairman: We'll now go to Mr. Roy Atkinson, executive director of the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy Task Force. You have a very thick deck here, sir, and we only have 30 minutes. So if you want to get some questions in, I'll leave it up to you as to what you want to do.

Mr. Roy Atkinson (Executive Director, Canadian Biotechnology Strategy Task Force): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have been told you'd like a presentation. You see the thick deck, but we learned yesterday that you were looking for something that was closer to five minutes. We've already précised it, but we brought the whole deck with us so you can fill in the pieces. I'll just go through some of the highlights of it.

I know you've been involved in having hearings for some time, so I suspect you might like to hear a little about what we've been hearing in the consultations, because we've been involved in a very extensive consultation process. So if that works for you, I can give you the minimum set-up, if you like, of where we're going or what we're trying to do. Then I can share with you some of the things we heard as we went around the country. I'll do my best to keep it under ten minutes, maybe even five.

You've been involved in this for some time, and it was interesting listening to Mrs. Gadsby because she talked in your last slide about global stewardship and at the same time being a global leader. That's very much the challenge that has been put to us. How do you marry those two things in ways that are effective so we can live up to those stewardship obligations in a way that allows us to capture the economic benefits at the same time? This is a large part of what the reframing of the strategy is about. I'm just trying to lay out a track for doing that so we can square what some people consider to be a circle.

• 1030

We're certainly spending a great deal of time looking at the question of partnerships. Who needs to work together on this? I think it's pretty clear if you think about it for more than a few minutes that no individual group can do this alone. So that was the challenge.

There are a number of things we will be trying to generate as deliverables, if you like, from the strategy. One of them is a new policy framework that will deal with vision objectives and some guiding principles. In our discussions around the country we heard some suggestions for how to improve what you'll see in the annex there, what we went out with, in terms of recasting it and ways of setting it up so it may lead to more easily recognizable action steps.

We're under instructions to come back with advice on a new broad-based advisory body that would report to federal ministers, and we're looking for ways to enhance public information, participation, and education—a theme you've already heard, I guess, from your two previous presenters.

A piece of our mandate is something that only brings joy to the hearts of bureaucrats, and that's to try to look internally within the federal system at ways to strengthen the way we as a government manage what is a horizontal file. It affects agriculture, health, environment, fisheries, and forestry. This is an enabling technology, and we have to give some thought to how to do that a bit better.

“The biotech agenda” is the rubric we use for thinking about where we go from here. We've been collecting ideas as we go on what are the key areas and things we need to do. Again, I come back to the partnerships. How do we go forward together?

This is a quick list of the major groupings of people we've been working with in the round tables. It's obviously across the federal community. There are 21 departments and agencies involved. We've been working with the provincial governments in the round tables, the part I've been responsible for. They've been involved in it, we've met with them separately, and they've been involved in all the sector consultations. Of course industry is there, consumer groups, NGOs, universities, and we've gone out of our way to try to involve representatives of what we call the larger community civil society, everything from the traditional consumers' groups through to various health advocate groups to the environmental sector, so there is an opportunity for a wide input.

Our consultations have been broken down into a couple of main tracks spanning roughly March and April. One track has been around the round table where we're looking at these broad strategic issues and the advisory body, and then there are sectoral consultations and a separate one on R and D. The provinces have been involved in all of them.

We also have tried to make this as open as we can through a web site, where all the consultation documents are up, and there will be reports on what we heard. Indeed, if any of you have any particular interest, say, in what went on in the R and D consultations, there will be public reports. It's quite an open process. We're trying to make it as engaging as we can.

I thought I'd give you a bit of a sense of what we were hearing of the highlights, if you like, from the round tables. These are the pieces where we're looking at the policy framework, the advisory body, and some of the questions around public engagement communications. We had five round tables in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Saskatoon, and Vancouver; 140 different groups participated in these.

When we were sending out the invitations, we tried to divide the guest list into three large sections. One was experts in and of themselves, expert in some topic that was relevant to the subject. Another was industry, which included the whole productive cycle—farmers, farming groups, seed companies, all the way down the whole agriculture chain, the health chain, the environmental chain, and people who were involved in the productive side. Then the third was the larger community, the civil society, with a rough matching between health and health-interested civil groups, agriculture and agricultural ones.

The message we got back quite uniformly was that there was a sense that this was timely. It doesn't matter what part of our community people were coming from; it was a good opportunity to take a deep breath and think about where we were going. We've been in this since 1983. There have been a lot of changes and progress, and it's a good time to stop and have a look and think about how we go forward for the next decade.

There was certainly a strong sense, again across the community, that people wanted to be involved in this. I guess Mrs. Gadsby has talked about the speed at which things are going forward. Whether it's the industry or the environmental movement or the groups looking out for disabled Canadians, people want to be involved. They see it as an opportunity. Some of them see the dark side, as someone said earlier, and they want to make sure these things are balanced.

• 1035

We got a really interesting message that it was perceived as a rush, and asking why we were in such a hurry to do this. At the same time, though, we were getting quite a consistent set of messages to act, because we've had lots of consultations in the past. So you have this interesting dynamic on our part between our trying to do it quickly and their getting to action plans at the same time. When you're trying to build partnerships, that presents an interesting challenge for us.

I think it's fair to say that there is a significant expectation out there that we will be back to work with the partners in this process, to try to work through the action plans, strategic initiatives, and to put those programs together for Canada as a whole so that we get strong alignment between what is going on with the federal government, the provinces, industry, and get these pieces set up in ways in which everyone is comfortable and they're in fact effective.

In terms of the specifics that were in the consultation document, I think there's broad agreement around the vision objectives and principles as they're framed. They're contained in the annex here.

That doesn't mean there wasn't lots of heated debate. There certainly was debate around it. But in terms of the elements that were there, I don't think anybody who participated was trying to eliminate the subjects or the topics or the issues or the basic principles that were advanced.

There were suggestions for changes in the content. There were questions around whether you frame it in terms of quality of life as being the dominant thing we're looking for, and biotech is a means to an end, or whether you try to frame this as a strategy that deals with biotech, and from that might come the other things. So we had that kind of debate.

We had some around the questions of an international context.

Again, I was interested in your slide, when you were talking about the work you're doing on the stewardship side, working with the developing world. There are certainly members of our community who think it's important that we have obligations there to try to help them where we can and try to make sure that if we're generating products, we don't unintentionally do damage in their environments.

We got a strong sense that responsible stewardship is good business and that if we are responsible, as Canadians are, and we do this a way in which you would expect us to, that's good business, too. It's curious; I'm sure the Americans would never have words like “be responsible” in a rallying cry for an industry, and yet I think I see a broad basis of support for that notion.

It was pointed out to us that we certainly do need to worry about human resources in these areas as we go forward. In fact, you've heard that here today. Whether it's for the purposes of science or on the industry side, a key part of what we look at is to try to make sure that the human resource issues are well dealt with.

In terms of the advisory body, again, there were some points of consensus, although not without debate. Nonetheless, the weight of opinion was that it certainly makes sense to have it reporting to ministers. Note the “s” on the end of that word. That's unusual, at least in the federal system. Typically, ministerial advisory bodies report to an individual minister. Again, because of the enabling character of this technology, there was a sense that it in fact ought to be reporting to more than one minister.

How do you populate this structure? The debate ranged across three broad categories: stakeholders, or groups that have an immediate and obvious self-interest; experts, who would not be advocates for any individual stakeholder group but would be there because of their expertise; and citizens. In terms of it being citizen-based, I think consultative conferences are the preferred instrument for that. The experts and the advocates come and present to them.

After quite a bit of debate around that issue, I think the weight of the opinion comes in that the members on the body should be expert-based, and they would not be there as advocates for any particular stakeholder group. Nonetheless, they need to have good connections out there, because there was a very strong sense that in the conduct of its affairs, it needs to be open. It needs to be working with the various communities that are there on issues that are of importance to the public at large. They ought to be using a tool kit that's broad enough that it allows for detailed consultation on the issues that would be put to them.

There was a strong sense that it needs to be forward-looking, not dealing with yesterday's problems, but trying to get, in a sense, ahead of the curve, either looking at issues that are tough things that need to be dealt with now or putting our minds ahead and trying to get prepared for things that will be coming as we go forward.

I want to underline the open and transparent part, because I think that was a really important part of the whole process, that it be public. In the work we're doing, in a sense we're very much there already, because we're trying to be as open as we can. Our reports are all in the public domain.

• 1040

The question of public engagement, involvement and participation was virtually a sine qua non. Everybody was saying we need to educate the population and this is a phenomenon in our society now. It's only going to grow, and it's important for us as a society that people know what bio is and how it works. We need to be more proactive in terms of communications programs and have a coordinated, consistent, significant program to educate and inform our population. In the discussions with the provinces it very often ran into educational things, right back into school programs and up through the universities. In fact, you've heard today from Mrs. Gadsby as well about the need for consumer information.

There was a very strong sense from the provinces that they would like to engage with the federal government in a dialogue at what we call the strategic level. In the work I'm responsible for, we're not attempting to displace or replace the dialogue that goes on amongst the agriculture departments or the health or environment departments. We're very deliberately trying to look across the set and see how these strategic pieces go together. There was a strong sense from the provinces that they would like to work with us. If we're capable of doing it here, they'd like to work with us on it.

On the question of partnerships, if we can find ways to work constructively with all of the partners, we will be able to move from what might be considered a federal strategy to a true Canadian strategy that would benefit all of us.

There was a strong sense again for that support between economic development and stewardship. I'm sure you hear it everywhere you go, and I don't think anyone challenges that. A few people suggested maybe we should take a deep breath and slow down the pace of things that are there. Others simply said we have to get on with it. In order to deal with the stewardship issues, perhaps we have to buttress the resources, time and energy we put into that side. I don't know if that's how you would interpret the message you heard from Mrs. Gadsby today about making sure the regulatory system was well staffed and equipped so it could do its job effectively and quickly, but that could be part of a consistent message.

From the provinces we heard things you would expect in terms of regional differences. They're not all the same and they don't all have the same problems, so whatever kind of national strategy we're able to construct should reflect those differences. At the same time, there should be a strong recognition of the importance of clusters—minimum critical size. If you're going to go forward on biotech you need to have some threshold base there. I guess Saskatoon is the most famous example we have in the country of a cluster that really seems to work. It's a very impressive initiative that's going on. We found a large amount of cooperation among industry, the provinces and the federal government.

Where do we go from here? We're in the process of generating reports on what we heard. We have three of our five on the web site already, and each of the sector consultations is in the process of doing the same work. They're not all complete yet. Agriculture and R and D are finished and we expect to see those reports shortly available. We have about a month, as your public servants, to integrate this and try to put together the policy framework, advisory body, recommendations of public information and the bio agenda, and put that advice to the government before it rises this summer.

There's one last little bullet. There's an ongoing process, and I haven't spoken much about it but I think it's important to underline it. While we're going through the step now of trying to think about where we go from here, it's clear on all fronts that this is an ongoing process. Biotechnology is a fundamental technology and it's growing rapidly. It is changing so quickly and will have such profound effects on us that you can't write a strategy, pour it in concrete and go away from it. We're not building bridges here. This needs to be a dynamic process, and whatever we put together by way of recommendations for how the government manages its affairs internally in that ongoing dialogue, it will have to be something that's flexible and adaptable. It will be an ongoing process. It's not a one-shot effort.

I'm a little over; I'm sorry.

The Chairman: Thank you both for your presentations. We only have 15 minutes left, so we'll get right to questions.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome again, Mr. Atkinson.

I want to go to the word “partnership”. Everybody wants to be in partnership with a farmer. I want to tell you today that farmers are in worse financial shape than they were five or six years ago, especially the grain farmers. Everybody seems to be getting their share in this partnership except the producers. We were told that we would have to feed five billion people by 2000 or 2001 and that we had to increase exports to $20 billion. We surpassed it, and we're still starving.

• 1045

How long do you think this trend can continue? I get phone calls and letters immediately when I see a story about biotechnology coming out that says you can treat a seed so that there are breeder rights such that it won't produce next year. You will be handicapped for using your own seed. You'll have to buy that treated or that breeders' rights seed. This seems to be happening everywhere.

I just got a piece across my desk a week ago—I think all the other MPs probably got it—about what percentage of the feather industry, egg industry, and milk industry the producers get out of the food basket dollar. I was astounded. Look at a breakfast. I think the most I saw producers get was 35¢.

Where does the partnership go so that we, as farmers, can survive? I heard Ms. Gadsby say that they were giving this technology for less money to underdeveloped countries than what we were paying. So are we also, as farmers, paying for this technology to develop the third world countries while we are starving as farmers?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: I would hesitate to connect those in the way that you connected them. I think the agricultural industry in Canada is very aware of the fact that it has to leave dollars on the table for farmers.

I did a presentation at EuropaBio in the Netherlands last year. We talked a lot about competitiveness. The easiest summary I gave to them was that we had information that said our production system, although it cost more on some of the inputs because it reduced the need for other inputs and it increased the yield, actually left $68 per acre more in the farmer's pocket at the end of the day, which is why he would be interested in taking on some of those higher inputs and get away from some of those others.

So I think we have to look at the full production system and the way it pencils out in total, not whether one particular input went up or down. I think the industry is very aware of it. I share your frustration in terms of the margin that the producers themselves get out of the value chain, but I believe we essentially have a policy in this country to move toward cheap food production. I don't know how you resolve the two to keep the good farmers in business.

Mr. Jake Hoeppner: What we're trying to do is deregulate the producer. We've done away with the transportation subsidies. We've done away with the GRIP program and all the protections that farmers had.

This farmer you're talking about can use that $68 extra input cost to get more grain, but he may not have a crop. He doesn't have the insurance today to cover that. We're talking about a more deregulated producer but a more regulated industry so they can recoup their costs. It won't work in the end; something is going to break.

The Chairman: Thank you, Jake.

I think Mr. Hoeppner is trying to say that this committee's primary interest is in the primary producer. We want to find out where the primary producer is fitting into this whole strategy here.

With that, we'll go to Mrs. Alarie.

[Translation]

Mrs. Hélène Alarie: Five recommendations were put forward in the 1998 report of the National Biotechnology Advisory Committee set up by the Department of Industry. Among other things, the committee recommended that the 1993-94 budgets of federal granting councils be increased threefold by the year 2003. The recent budget speech didn't come close to supporting this recommendation. It's difficult to believe that the Department of Industry is willing to move forward in this field when the budgets announced this year haven't changed since 1994. We are not even close to the target.

I read in one of the briefing papers prepared for committee members that capital placement activity in health-care-related biotechnology exceeded that in food and agriculture by a margin of 10:1 in 1995. I was surprised to see that in 1996, the margin was 70:1.

• 1050

Even though we may want to forge partnerships to carry out research projects, partners are only interested if there are short-term gains to be had.

Once the consultation process is completed, you will be making some recommendations. In your opinion, shouldn't special consideration be given to agriculture because, on the one hand, the granting councils are not receiving the necessary funding and, on the other hand, the industry does not seem to be as generous toward this field? We welcome your suggestions because we must also do our bit.

[English]

Mr. Roy Atkinson: Just so I can be clear, is the report you're referring to the NBAC report? Yes, okay.

That report came from the current National Biotechnology Advisory Committee, which advises the Minister of Industry. It has been submitted to the minister, and it's my understanding that he will be asking the industry committee to review it and make recommendations on it. In a sense, it's an input to the whole process that's going on in terms of the renewal of the Canadian biotechnology strategy.

Second, in terms of agriculture and its role, in our work, not only have we done this series of horizontal consultations, but we have a set of sector consultations as well, one of them specifically on agriculture. It's recognized that agriculture is obviously distinct and different from health, and the kinds of problems and opportunities that exist there are different.

In relative terms, if you look at it on a global basis, Canada is strong. I suspect we will never, in absolute terms, dominate what goes on. Well, maybe we will if Mrs. Gadsby is correct on canola, but it will be hard to dominate agriculture on a global basis. But in proportionate terms, as a country, we deploy more of our science resources there and we have more of our companies in that area.

I think you're meeting later with Margaret Kenny from Agriculture. She led the agriculture consultations, so she may be able to give you a better sense about what was coming back on the agriculture file per se. I wasn't directly involved in that.

[Translation]

Mrs. Hélène Alarie: The reaction I always have to this is that agriculture is unique and therefore requires special measures, unlike those required in other industrial sectors. It is an industry where yields are not always short-term. Capital turnover is not the same as in other sectors. There is no indication from these recommendations that agriculture is getting any kind of special consideration.

[English]

Mr. Roy Atkinson: In our work we recognize that there are significant differences between what happens in health, agriculture, environment, and forestry. These are very different sectors, and the challenges and opportunities are different in them.

Part of what we'll be looking to do is to have not only horizontal policies that might address, or that we hope will address, a variety of those issues, but also, on sectoral lines as well, we are in fact looking to sectors to try to see how to take best advantage of this within a sectoral context. You can have a variegated strategy that recognizes sectoral differences. That's the intent.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: We in the industry believe that's exactly an excellent point that we have to incorporate somehow into this strategy. Agriculture does face some unique challenges, because we are exporters to the world. We have to have an international environment that will accept these products of biotechnology, and accept them in a timely fashion, so that our farmers can market those products without taking a financial disadvantage and losing market share.

Clearly that's one of the messages from the ag sector to the Canadian biotech strategy: we would like to see a recognition of those special international needs incorporated, and that we don't just say our biotech policy stops at the borders of this country. Our biotech strategy has to include the rest of the world.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Mr. McCormick.

Mr. Larry McCormick: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Margaret, you were mentioning how on two graphs the United States is way up here and Canada's way down below on the use or the production or the acreage. I was just wondering if you could go back to that. I know I'm just asking for one—

• 1055

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: It's a total acreage graph, partially it's because corn in the United States is one of the first crop platforms for biotechnology. So the uptake in corn has been enormous and the acreage in corn is quite high. In Canada, most of our acres are in specialty crops like canola and potatoes at this point in time. When and if we get to a point where we have biotechnology in wheat or barley, then I think you'll see those graphs dramatically increase. But right now, we're not in Canada's biggest crop.

Mr. Larry McCormick: Is Canada making much use of the biotechnology as far as the corn production we have is concerned in comparison to the United States?

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: Not so much. Mostly, there's a bit of a time delay. Most of the corn varieties that are being marketed in the United States are not suitable for the heat units in southern Ontario, and so they're taking, basically, a couple more years in order to have the same traits from biotechnology bred into the material that's suitable for southern Ontario. We will get them, but as I say, they will tend to be delayed.

Mr. Larry McCormick: Of course, the heat unit story and the need for food for the future and even for now always makes me think about northern Ontario. Of course, I can't expect you to just do research for the clay belt, but I happen to pass through that area a very few times a year and I think that probably three-quarters of it has never been cleared yet and the possibility is there for the future. I wouldn't make any provincial comments about the fact that the New Liskeard agricultural station is somewhat stagnant, but that clay belt has huge possibilities for us.

Ms. Margaret Gadsby: I think one of the things we, the industry, have been hoping to get incorporated in the feedback on the R and D sector of the CBS is to recognize there are some agricultural production systems in Canada that are small enough whereby they will never attract commercial interest. Because of that, I think we need to make decisions as Canadians as to whether that means we wish to use public funds to support those through the research network we have in place today, and if so, to make sure it's adequately funded. If we are going to make a transgenic something or other that's suited to the more northern production areas, then the clearances are going to have to be obtained globally if that's an export commodity.

Right now I think that's still a struggle in terms of some of our research groups doing the research, trying to begin the commercialization process, but not having the wherewithal to complete the process internationally, and that's really what we need.

Mr. Larry McCormick: Thank you. Mr. Chair, as I leave Mr. Atkinson to go to the HRD committee, there is a bill in front of that committee on the Canada Labour Code to transport these commodities, so it does affect all ministries, or most all. Thank you.

The Chairman: Mrs. Ur, do you have a question, or anybody else?

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: If there's time, I have a couple of questions. You said you had all these round-table discussions, and we've certainly had many questions about this one, but what sectoral lines caused the most heated discussions?

Mr. Roy Atkinson: It didn't come up on sectoral lines in the round tables that I was working on, because we were working in the sense that we were the umbrella over top of that. The debates there were largely around making sure we have adequate instruments and methods to do the stewardship issues: health, safety and environment. Do they work? Do Canadians believe they work? How do you do that? Questions of social and ethical issues—should they be embedded in a broad policy and framework? How do you do that?

In the advisory body there was a really interesting dynamic around this question of stakeholders. Do you have a stakeholder-based body or do you have the general public or experts, and how do you do that? The polling results we see tell us that about half the population trusts experts and half of them don't trust them at all. There's just this great split in the middle. Experience tells us that if you have stakeholder-based bodies you frequently get people dug into corners where it's very difficult to have a consensus emerge from that process.

• 1100

In fact, the magic of what happened in that process was that over quite a broad range—not everybody, obviously—we ended up with the sense that experts are probably the way to go, but linked to that you must have this strong connection with the public. As well, it must be open and transparent so that the people who trust the experts can see what they're doing, and people who don't can also see what they're doing and can make sure they have their input into that open and transparent process.

For me it was a really interesting experience. Some of the places we were in were just electric. There was this wonderful, positive thing happening. People were coming from very different perspectives, but with few exceptions, everybody was there to work together.

So I think there's a real sense that this is the way of the future, and whether you want to embrace it or have some concerns about it, people want to be there to participate.

Mrs. Rose-Marie Ur: You had partners in the process. You listed several industry and consumer groups, NGOs and universities. But I think you missed a very basic fact here, and it relates to the computer age. You can sell kids on computers more than you can people of my old age.

I think you've missed the bag here. You should be looking at our elementary schools, starting that young, to educate them on biotech. It's perhaps a little bit easier to grasp some of this material when you're young than it is when you're part of the older generation.

Mr. Roy Atkinson: That's a good point. Actually, in our round tables we did include representatives of the Pugwash group, which are students, albeit university students. They had some really wonderful insights. In our discussions with the provinces, they very frequently turned to the question of school-age children and what can be done. It was generally started under the rubric of communications, and it very rapidly flowed into education.

That'll be an interesting opportunity for a partnership. Education is clearly provincial territory, and yet if there are things for us to do...and there are. I think one of the things that was quite clear in terms of communications is that we do have a regulatory system, one that's well recognized, and yet it's amazing how little people know about what's actually being done.

I had that clearly demonstrated to me at a lab in Saskatoon that is open as part of the communications program. The young woman who runs this lab told me that people who come in don't know that their food is inspected. They don't know what goes on in terms of environmental rules and regulations. She said she was having a terrible time explaining to people what was going on until the Canadian Food Inspection Agency came up with an information kit. She has had to hang that on the wall so that when people want to know how field trials are done, or how food is inspected, they have all of this material there.

That's a relatively recent addition to the kit, if you like, of communications tools. There was a sense that the federal government really needs to tell people more about what it's doing. I mean, we're doing a good thing, so why don't we tell people? That would be good for the general public and, by the way, for the industry, because then there might be less concern and anxiety.

There were also examples in the international arena of having our regulators talk with regulators in other countries. We are on the leading edge, particularly in agriculture. If our people who are worried about stewardship and the land and food safety have figured something out, they should share it, because if some of these international products are trying to be sold in some country, then our regulators can work with their regulators. That's credible, because that's what their job is. We can perhaps help that way as well.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

What is your timeframe to report to the ministers?

Mr. Roy Atkinson: We have to report back before the House rises.

The Chairman: Early June. We'll have time, then, for some input into your report.

Mr. Roy Atkinson: The sooner the better. We have seven different ministers who will have to sign this, so there's an interesting management process internally. In the public consultation process, we've asked everyone to have their input in to us by April 30.

The Chairman: So Rose-Marie will have to work overtime.

Mr. Roy Atkinson: I'm sorry, but that's part of this anxiety about the speed. We're trying to do something quickly. The sooner the better, sir.

At any rate, I'd very much appreciate it. If you have thoughts on it, it would help us enormously.

The Chairman: Okay.

Thank you very much. I know our time was short, but it was very interesting. Thank you both.

We are adjourned.