I'll come at it from two perspectives, the farm perspective and the competitiveness perspective.

Health Canada has released its guidance around gene editing for food, but it also requires the CFIA to release the guidance for biosafety and for feed. Typically, food is what we actually anticipated taking the longest. That's done. We are now, I believe, essentially waiting for signatures from the CFIA, two pieces. However, there are three legs to that stool.

It's critically important. What's actually interesting is that genetic modification is very expensive. There aren't that many companies that do it. Dr. Fakhri is correct in that assertion. It costs millions of dollars to do genetic modification. There are only a few crop varieties in Canada that actually are GMO, so the vast majority of the acres planted are not. However, what's interesting is that gene editing is very inexpensive. Actually, what we anticipate in the canola sector is that we'll have more seed companies, smaller seed companies, start-up seed companies, that can use a CRISPR-Cas9 technology and do things differently, which we think is really interesting. Could canola fix its own nitrogen? Could it become more efficient with nitrogen, more drought-tolerant, more disease-tolerant?

Getting clear gene-editing guidelines is good for farmers. It's good for Canadian innovation. We'll also probably see more start-up companies. Canada has over 200 seed companies alone, and we're a relatively small global market. What is also interesting is that these will also potentially have knock-on environmental benefits as well. Getting that across the finish line.... The rest of the world is there, with the exception of the EU. Argentina, Brazil, South America, the U.S. and Australia have clear guidance when it comes to how to take a product from R and D to commercialization. We just need that clearly spelled out for the companies so that they can invest here in Canada and so that canola farmers have more options for what they want to buy when they go to their local retailers.

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