We're concerned about the Growing Forward.... We welcome the flexibility to address provincial issues, because every province is different. In Ontario, where we are right now, we have so many sizes of farms and varied commodities that our food safety needs are quite different from those of other provinces.
The concern is that there won't be any overview of the national system, that provinces will be able to work together, that there will be fairness. What we're proposing is an industry-government process by which we will know what the other provinces are doing--and so does government--and that the funding simply doesn't go out on an.... And it is. It's on a first-come, first-served basis. Growers from provinces that don't have a lot of money to put toward this are going to be penalized by this whole thing.
The other thing I would like to mention too, Mr. Easter, is the traceability issue. We need provincial traceability systems that work within the national system. In the earlier presentation by the Canadian Supply Chain Food Safety Coalition, there were questions about what we require as far as minimum standards and about other provinces having better standards.
We have to be very aware that for traceability in particular, some of it is for emergency management purposes and another level is for market access purposes, and the national and provincial systems need to be strictly for emergency management purposes. Whether you call it basic standards, minimum standards, or science-based standards, it only needs to be this good to be traceable. If I want to market my product and sell more, then I can do the Cadillac version.
But in Canada we need to meet global standards. We need to meet national and provincial standards. I've been to a global conference, and the recommendation was that the global standard needs to be the lowest it can possibly be and ensure traceability and food safety for emergency management and animal health issues. I don't want us to lose track of that thought.