Yes, at the time, everything was working fine in the agriculture sector. You will recall that, since 1978 at least, Quebec has been combining, various services in the agri-food sector. Quebec's agriculture department is called Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, and is also responsible for fishing and marketing.
Being bigger, the federal government was slower to react. Finally, in 1996, almost 18 years later, it realized that it had to combine three food inspection services from three different departments. Not so long ago, Industry Canada also had its own inspection service.
We have been told that this ought to be done because it represents savings of $40 million. If the figures are right, and if we add them all together over a period of, let us say, 10 years, it means that because of its lack of efficiency and of duplication in three of its own departments, the government lost $400 million. It now recognizes that it has been inefficient for 18 years. That is unacceptable.
Yes, we want the federal government to put its house in order but, as usual, a number of clauses in this bill will make it possible, through the Department of Agriculture and other departments, for the government to infringe on provincial jurisdiction. The bill reads in part that the federal government may enter into agreements with the provinces, but I doubt that it will because most of the time it does not.
The Quebec government gave its approval to the spirit of the bill, but last summer, at a meeting of agriculture ministers, the Quebec minister, speaking for his government, said: "The premiers urge the ministers concerned to ask that the Canadian food inspection system's implementation group recommend before the end of the year ways to set up a Canadian food inspection system. That is true.
At the annual agriculture ministers' conference held in Victoria on July 3 and 4, the ministers adopted the wording proposed by the Quebec minister, which reminded the federal government that the
Quebec government intended to co-operate in eliminating overlap and duplication, but asked that Quebec's jurisdiction be respected.
Since I am familiar with agriculture, I know that Quebec has about 495 officials working in food inspection and that in the three federal departments mentioned in the bill there are at least 600 officials involved in food inspection in Quebec. I talk about Quebec because it is the province I know best.
So, there is a total of 1,100 federal and provincial employees to inspect food in Quebec. I can understand that the federal government wanted to streamline its services. But it should go a step further and respect provincial jurisdiction.
If the federal government is sincere in its willingness to work with the provinces, it should negotiate with the Quebec agriculture department a way for the provinces to apply the required standards because food products do not only travel from province to province, but also to other countries. So the federal government would set common standards that would be accepted by the provincial agriculture ministers and by the federal minister, and Quebec, which has already integrated its services and which acted a long time ago to eliminate overlap, would apply these standards.
One food inspection service, with responsibilities for municipalities with regard to the third market is the one for distribution in Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières. We have already made arrangements with these municipalities so they can enforce the regulations in restaurants because it is more easily done at the municipal level.
The federal government should do the same thing as Quebec did with its large cities and work out an integrated action plan with Quebec so we no longer have two kinds of food inspectors: type A, B and C laboratories. This system often causes confusion, and some agricultural producers, depending on the region, are affected by this conflict between two jurisdictions.
Yes, this bill is an improvement, or it would be more accurate to describe it as policy of the not so bad, because the federal government has been inefficient in the area of food inspection for at least 20 years. We hope it will be more efficient in the future, and the ideal situation would be a co-operative arrangement between the federal government and the Quebec government to eliminate overlap and create a fully integrated and coherent network.