PANEL DISCUSSION - MAINTENANCE OF REGISTRATION
Hello. Well, I'll trying to make this as quick and painless as possible because I know we've had two and a half full days right now. But I just wanted to give a brief overview of how to maintain your registration. You've heard two days now of how to go about getting a registration. And that's obviously the hard part. Maintaining the registration is not difficult, but there are a few things that you need to do. If you don't do them, you'll end up having the product become noneligible for sale in Canada. Which means you can't sell your product anymore. And that's a real pain after you've gone to all the work to get it registered. So I'll just do a brief overview.
First of all, you need to know that we have maintenance fees in Canada. That came in, I believe, in '96. We had a regulation come in to establish maintenance fees to maintain the registration of products that are currently registered.
Now, the thing you need to know is that the maintenance fees are per-product. The upper limit is $2,690 Canadian per year, which is probably a hundred dollars U.S. or something; I'm not sure. Anyway, generally, you can apply for a reduced fee. And I would assume that most of the biopesticide products would fall into that category. So if you can show that -- you would have to let us know what your annual sales are, and you can reduce it down to 3 percent of your annual sales of use in Canada with a minimum fee of $75 a year per product.
We actually send invoices out in April to you, so you'll know exactly how much you will owe. And you would have to obviously apply then to let us know that you're going for the reduced fee. But I think that the vast majority of the products here would definitely fall into the reduced fee category. So that's good news.
The other thing that we have is registration renewal. And I'm sure those who are currently registered in Canada are familiar with that program. I'll just give you a little brief analysis of the way it used to work because it has changed in the last few years and you need to know that.
We used to grant registrations for five years at a time. It was always a year that ended in a zero or a year that ended in a five. So what would happen is if your product was registered in August of 1995, you would have received a registration until December 31 of 1995, and then you have to go through registration renewal which is essentially a label exercise. But it sort of didn't make a lot of sense to be giving some products five years and some products one year. And then if we just registered your product, we're going through renewal again, and it meant that all our products were going through renewal at the exact same time, so we had this huge glut of renewals coming.
So we've actually changed the process in 1995. Essentially what happens now is any new product or any label amendment that gets registered in Canada will get five years from the date. Now, it still always goes to December 31, but if had a product registration today, your registration would go until 2006.
And, theoretically, if you're constantly amending your label, you will constantly get an additional five year registration and you would actually never go through a renewal process at all. But if we haven't seen your label in five years, you will have to go through the renewal process.
And essentially what happens is we will send you a registration renewal package. And we have a nice little pamphlet which would be sent to you. It explains all the stuff that's needed and all the forms. Essentially, it's $154 per product. And we send you a registration renewal form, and we'll send you enough forms -- we'll actually send you a printout if you have multiple products. You might have multiple products going through renewal in any given year. I would assume most companies here don't have that many, but you might not hear from us for that year. But it depends on how many products you have.
So you'll get a form that will tell you which products are going through renewal. And you'll get a set of forms for each product. And, essentially, it's up to you. It's to let us know which products that you're going to continue selling and marketing.
We'll find a lot of companies who say, oh, I haven't marketed that product in years; so they want to discontinue it. So that's your opportunity to discontinue the registration if you choose. And if you want to renew it, what you need to do is send us a label.
And we've just started this year we actually asked for a product specification form as well with the CAS numbers. And that's sort of feeding into our whole formulants policy that we've been working on over the last little while and that we're trying to get sort of up and running. So we do, also, ask for the product specification form. And that's a way of allowing us to see whether your label is still the label we approved, and it is also a way to allow us to update some. Often there are disposal statements or new safety requirements that we might ask and that's something that you can normally put on voluntarily so we want to just make sure that those things have been essentially updated on the label.
If you do want to discontinue the product, it is all in this package that would be sent to you. But if you choose to discontinue a registration, you would tell us that you wish to discontinue the registration. It actually will stay on our books for one year and that's to allow the product to sort of be filtered through the system. You would obviously have retailers that are still selling the product. So it's sort of a way to get the product out of the market over the year. And then it would have an additional three years where it could be used by users.
Now, the other thing you need to know is if you don't renew your product it then becomes noneligible for sale and use in Canada. We generally ask the companies to have their forms in by November of any given year, which should give us enough time to make sure it's renewed by January 1. We allow a few months grace, obviously on that. But if you haven't sent the form in, basically, as of January 1 of any given year you cannot sell your product anymore in Canada.
We do allow a reinstatement for one year. And it's essentially the same information that we request in a registration renewal package. Once the year has expired, if you want to come back in, you'll probably have to go through a new registrations. Again, it's sort of case by case. But it's important to get renewal done when it gets sent to you.
And I think that was about the only thing I wanted to mention. We do, also, ask for four sets of labels for the renewal as well as an electronic copy in PDF format.
I guess the only other thing I wanted to mention briefly -- I don't have a slide for it because I hadn't really thought of mentioning it until earlier today -- is the fact that if you do have temporary registrations which are sort of similar to the U.S. conditional registration, they're normally granted for one year. And if you actually haven't got the data or information in that you're requesting to convert it to a full registration, you do have to do an extension of your temporary registration. And it's essentially similar information to what we request in the renewal package.
And when you've sent your original temporary registrations, you will get a letter that will tell you all the information that's required for converting it to a full registration. But it will also tell you what's required to extend the temporary registration. If you haven't got the data in to us and it's going to take a long time for us to review, we do suggest that you get a submission in to extend the temporary registration and that would really just ensure that your product can be used for another full year until we get the data in to evaluate it and convert it to full registration.
I think that's it. So I guess I'll take questions at the end unless there's anything right now.