Thank you.
It may be that my colleague would like to elaborate on the health risk assessment process; I can talk a little bit about our monitoring programs, if you wouldn't mind, Mr. Chair.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has in place a monitoring program to determine the general levels in the food supply. It's not targeted at the level in a specific shipment of food, but it provides us with a picture of what levels are in the overall food supply. That's called our monitoring program. We publish our plan and its results every year. It's our national chemical residue monitoring program.
When we find a positive as a result of that program, we will first look at it to determine if it is in any way likely to pose a health risk. “Significantly” is probably the wrong word here; when we say significantly higher, anything that looks like it's higher than the MRL we will refer to Health Canada.
When a risk assessment is done and determines that it's not a health concern, it is still nonetheless a regulatory violation, so we institute follow-up action so that subsequent shipments from that particular supplier are tested and must be demonstrated to be within the residue limit. When something looks as though it may be a health concern, we submit information on that to Health Canada; in this case it would be PMRA.