Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on May 4th, 2009

[Richard Doyle]

It's not just the industry.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Okay.

We're talking about the standards out there. Can you talk to me a little bit about food health, and also, as I mentioned, the absence of antibiotics and residue? As a former dairy producer, I know the consequences if you don't. I was fortunate never to have to drop. But are these standards now similar from province to province? Is a national standard set, and can provinces have standards that supersede it?

[Réjean Bouchard]

The process is the same; everything is tested. The only place it varies is where they may use a test that is different from one province to another, but they are equivalent tests: they have the same outcome. There is more than one test to detect the presence of residues, and different provinces have adopted different tests, but they are all the same in the end.

[Richard Doyle]

So the actual standard is the same.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I guess my time is up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Easter, for five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thanks.

I'll go back to Mr. de Valk.

In your importation of products, it seems the product you import meets quite similar rules to what our producers have to meet. In your knowledge of the other industries, be it beef, fruit and vegetables, whatever it may be, is that the case, and if not, why not?

One of the largest complaints we hear from producers is that products coming into the country are not required to meet the same standards as Canadian products. If it's lettuce coming from Mexico, for instance, you can use certain herbicides or fungicides in Mexico that we're not allowed to use here. Sometimes it's for the workers' health and safety, and sometimes it's our regulatory regime, yet that head of lettuce still gets on the consumer's shelf, undermining the price of our producers in this country who have what I say is a higher-quality product.

What's your experience in that area, or do you have any?

[Robert de Valk]

Yes, I think I can help you with a bit of an answer.

When it comes to this prior approval situation, that applies only to poultry products, pork products, beef products, and also processed vegetables. It does not apply to any other commodities or food products. So prior label registration is a very limited tool that is basically used in the meat industry. But it has been very successful, because we can keep out a lot of products that do not meet Canadian requirements.

Richard was saying that he notices a lot of dairy products on the shelf that do not meet Canadian requirements, but his industry is not subject to prior label approval. My suggestion, very late in the presentation, was that maybe Canada should be looking at requiring registration of all food products, imported and domestic, and then we have a label, we have traceability, we have lots of information, and in this electronic age we can make that happen pretty quickly. I think the time has come to consider that, and it may address the problem you're raising as well.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. de Valk.

Richard, you mentioned identification and traceability. I'll just use the small beef plant in P.E.I. It was geared to slaughter 700 animals a week, but it's not anywhere near that. That system was set up with traceability at substantial cost, but it's not in fact being utilized at the moment. I don't disagree with traceability, but why should farmers have to pick up all that cost? If it's traceable and a food safety issue to trace back if there's a problem down the line, who should pay for it? Where is that system at the moment in terms of coordination right across the industry, and with federal and provincial governments? What's the cost, and who is picking up the cost?

[Richard Doyle]

I'll let Réjean respond to that one.

[Réjean Bouchard]

As you're aware, animals need to be identified on the farm. Possibly in dairy every cow is identified. There is a national system, called national livestock identification, that has been in force, and animals need to be identified; it's a regulation. The tag in the animal's ear is the primary identification to identify where they are, and it is used to trace them if there is occurrence of disease. Animal identification is a basic tool for genetic improvement. You have to know which animal is bred with which animal. It's essential for milk recording too, because you need to be able to read data that you're collecting.

I don't know if I'm answering your question.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

You're answering it, Réjean, but the problem is—and I don't know whether we can recommend anything through this committee or not—that all of these costs in the system, and they all cost money, back down to the primary producer. Primary producers' incomes are very low in this country as compared to the United States. The debt load is high. Why should the primary producer have to be paying for food safety issues? Why isn't it the Canadian taxpayer, as a lot of it is done in the United States?

[Réjean Bouchard]

Specifically regarding traceability, we understand the new government program is coming. It's going to be in major part a government responsibility, where they pick up the cost of traceability. Whether or not this will happen is another question, but that's what we are told. They do recognize that there is a public good requirement there and that government needs to pick up part of their costs.

[Richard Doyle]

Can I add to this very briefly?

Mr. Easter will appreciate that in the case of a supply-managed industry, where the system allows the producer to recover their costs from the marketplace, you can recover these costs if you charge it to the farmers. If the ability of the farmers to recover their costs from the market had to stop, then just like the United States, you would have to have the government picking up and covering some of these costs. In industries that do not have the ability, because they don't have supply management, to go to the marketplace and transfer these costs, that's where you have to look at the government intervening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Doyle.

Mr. Anderson, five minutes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of questions about government agencies working together, and about how they work together in your system.

In terms of listeria, we've heard a fair amount about the fact that the provinces had to deal with it first. Then it came to the federal government, with a couple of different departments dealing with it. There has been some talk about their communication and that kind of thing.

How do the provincial and federal governments work together in the CQM? Are you dealing with one department, primarily CFIA? How do the provincial departments play into that? And if you have issues or problems, who resolves them?

[Richard Doyle]

The CQM itself is really a national system. It primarily involves Agriculture Canada and CFIA for that particular program. There is on-farm inspection at the provincial level in most provinces, and that continues. There is federal inspection as well, with regard to feed and other issues. The plants, whether you're registered or not registered, will have different inspection systems. So it's kind of a dual jurisdiction.

In your reference to listeria, that's not relevant to CQM; more so is the situation that has occurred with the cheese situation in Quebec. You had provincial interaction with the distributors and the manufacturers in particular. About a month and a half ago, with regard to imported raw milk cheese, which is under federal jurisdiction at that level because it's imported, they found on the market a number of imported cheese products with listeria. That became a bit of a media event--i.e., are the inspectors at CFIA more rigorous than the provincial government in Quebec has been in that particular case?

If you're asking my view on this, I'll be quite honest: you cannot inspect every single load. As much as I can support that we need more inspectors and we need to ensure that we have sufficient resources to carry the workload and the regulations that we have, it would not be realistic to think that every lot and every import of every product is tested, whether it's produced domestically or whether it's produced internationally. You have to do it through good random sampling, intelligent sampling. Obviously you're going to test more the problem cases that you've had in the past, and so on.

That's what I understand the agency is doing on imports. They test far more raw milk cheese than they would test maybe an old cheddar or an old cheese, for the reasons Réjean was talking about. The biological process would have pretty much taken care of most microbiological pathogens in any case.

Resources are scarce everywhere. It's scarce in the industry, it's scarce in the government. We all understand that. It's a question of being able to do the right job with what we have.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. McCain did make the point that he didn't believe this was a failure of inspection, that there were some issues in the system. I think you're backing that up.

Do you have any suggestions on how your system can be improved in terms of the interrelationship of the two governments? Or do you see them working together fairly well? You talked about the federal government doing one set of inspections and the provinces doing another. Do you see that they have good working relationships, or are there some suggestions you can make?

[Richard Doyle]

Right now we have a national committee where we bring together the provincial regulators and the federal regulators. We try to work on standards, so that we have more uniformity and we apply the same standards on quality. We've been working at this for quite a number of years.

I can tell you that I've been in this industry long enough to know that we've taken huge giant steps in terms of harmonization of quality standards across the country. I'm talking about quality from a microbiological point of view.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Just on that issue, then, we've had a discussion here a couple of times about meat standards across Canada, about whether we should have a national meat standard that all provincial abattoirs have to reach as well, and about whether it's good that we support the smaller abattoirs with a different standard and allow them, because they're dealing with a smaller market, to have a provincial standard.

You seem to think that in your industry it would be better to have a national standard, where everybody is pretty much on the same page. Is that correct? Or do you have an allowance for those smaller ones?

[Richard Doyle]

In our industry, we have worked very hard at developing our national dairy code, which established national standards asking the provinces that are signatories to that code to basically try to make sure that their provincial regulations are actually met.

There are differences still, but you have to understand that in our case, when the milk is collected, it goes in the truck. It's not each producer who decides where his milk goes. In a collective system like we have, it's more difficult. We do have some niche markets for the special feeding of certain animals that we'll be producing, or organic milk and so on, but the cost savings....

You will realize that with 13,400 producers of milk around the country, the costs of transportation alone would be absolutely exorbitant if you basically had each producer decide where their milk was going.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Can you tell us a little bit more about your traceability system, right from beginning to end? I guess I'm thinking both in terms of your products, such as milk, and also on the meat side, the animal management side. Could you take two or three minutes, or whatever?

[Richard Doyle]

All right. I'll have a go first, and Réjean will correct me.

Again, there's a bit of a slight difference. Agri-Traçabilité in Quebec is probably one of the best-renowned traceability systems in Canada. Fortunately, we have other good systems. They differ a little bit, but basically they're doing the same thing. In Quebec it's different because they use an electronic chip and an ear tag, and they do it at birth. When a calf is born, it's automatically identified and will continue to be identified all through its life cycle.

When the milk is produced from the farm, on each farm we now have identification by GPS of every location, of every housing of dairy animals, so you know exactly where each of the animals is located and you know it by terms of premises. When the milk is delivered, each of the farms is also identified. Samples are being kept, and they're tested by provincial laboratories, in most instances, once they're received at the plant. The plants also do their own tests on receipt of the milk with regard to residue in order to decide whether they should discard the whole truck or not. Then it goes into the silo.

You know where the milk is coming from, so you have a product in the end where you know the date of production, of the process of that product, and you will know exactly the lot of the milk silo it came from. You can trace the farms that have been delivering to that particular silo, and you will be able to identify back to the animals.

I don't how much more of a traceability system you could have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You're well over time, so thank you very much, Mr. Doyle.

Ms. Bennett, for five minutes.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thanks very much.

As you can imagine, we as committee members are receiving lots of things all the time from people who are trying to help, but people who obviously have a particular point of view.

I guess my question would be for Mr. de Valk, particularly in terms of what has been highlighted to us as to the difference between a product being imported into Canada or into the States. I don't know if you yourself have any of this. But someone highlighted that the United States inspects all imported meat shipments, but over 90% of meat shipments entering Canada are not inspected.