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HIGHLIGHTS OF RECENT CHANGES TO THE "PROCEDURES FOR THE REGISTRATION OF CROP VARIETIES IN CANADA"

December 1, 2000

1. The Variety Registration Office will be enforcing the existing requirement that as part of the application for registration the applicant supply a copy of the letter or motion of support and the experimental data used by the registration recommending committee to support the variety. In the past, flexibility was allowed when the support information and data were supplied to the Variety Registration Office by the recommending committee. The retrieval time involved in locating the support documents and the data supplied by the committee has, in combination with the high volume of applications processed on an annual basis, negatively effected the ability to process all applications on a timely basis.
2. All Canadian produced breeder seed being submitted as a legal reference sample must be affixed with a completed Canadian Seed Growers' Association Breeder Seed tag including the crop certificate number. The use of the declaration form for submission of information not on the tag is being discontinued. All reference samples must be submitted in new containers. Detailed requirements are found in Section II 5.9 and Appendix II of the Procedures document.
3. If a registrant allows an interim registration to expire, she/he must apply for reinstatement with submission of the appropriate fee ($200 per variety). Further details are provided in Section I.7 and II.5.11 of the Procedures document.
4. For varieties other than potatoes whose interim registrations have lapsed for a period greater than one year, a new legal reference sample must be submitted. This is consistent with the requirement for varieties being reinstated for permanent registration following a period of more than one year of the registration being cancelled. Reference samples of varieties whose registrations have been cancelled or allowed to lapse are routinely discarded on an annual basis due to storage space constraints in the Cultivar Verification Laboratory.
5. For registration of varieties that must be produced under a quality control system process (contract registration), the interaction with officials responsible for the Canada Grain Act and Canadian Wheat Board Act is clarified in Section I 4.3 a) of the Procedures Document and in Appendix VI.
6. Unless there are exceptional circumstances, CFIA will only add varieties to the OECD List of Cultivars, for which breeder seed is being maintained in Canada.   Further explanation is provided in Section II.5.n) of the Procedures document.

Please destroy all old Variety Registration Application Forms and previous copies of the "Procedures for the Registration of Crop Varieties in Canada" and use only the new application form dated December 1, 2000 found on this web site.