Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure as always to take part in a debate in this special chamber.
Tonight, of course, we are talking about the avian influenza issue. As I understand it, four main sectors are impacted: the chicken industry, the turkey industry, the egg industry, and the broiler hatching egg producers. In British Columbia we are told that of the poultry products in that province 80% comes from the Fraser Valley. The revenue generated exceeds $1 billion annually, so losing more than $3 million a week and the phased in depopulation of the 19 million birds will cost the B.C. industry hundreds of millions of dollars this year.
We know that the virus is concentrated in manure and in nasal and eye discharges of infected birds and that contact with wild birds is the highest risk for contamination since they carry the disease without necessarily showing the symptoms. Bird droppings, dust and soil all can serve as transmission corridors for the disease, together with vehicles, cages and clothing, which can carry the virus as well. Feed and water, where shared with the wild bird population, can also be a source. The minister, in answer to my question a few minutes ago, talked about the high pathogen-low pathogen issue.
The first line of defence, we all agree, is limiting what comes into contact with the birds. We know that biosecurity will break the cycle of contact, but in this case humans appear to be responsible for the rapid spread of the disease in British Columbia. I will now quote Dr. Brian Evans, the chief veterinarian of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, who suggests exactly this: that the investigation points to human transfer of the virus. Dr. Evans said:
Owners and managers of multiple barns, catching crews, feed suppliers, staff. Even the bio-security staff may be involved.
That is the issue on this particular contagious outbreak, an outbreak that is contagious among the chicken population. The avian flu in British Columbia is now in its third month. It has just started. It exploded from a small number of affected birds, a small number of affected farms, and a small geographic area within the Fraser Valley. It has now exploded outside the valley area and 19 million birds are going to be destroyed.
The biosecurity has been very seriously impacted and violated here and that is the question that must be answered. I do not know if this particular strain of avian flu is more serious or more virulent than the strains of the virus detected in Texas and Delaware earlier this year, but I do know that those two outbreaks in those two states were contained much more efficiently than how this has been contained in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.
In Gonzales County in Texas, 7,000 broiler chickens were destroyed on February 21 after an Asian influenza strain, H5N2, was discovered in a flock in that country. According to the Texas Animal Health Commission, since mid-February of this year more than 250 non-commercial and commercial flocks were tested within a 10 mile radius and no additional avian influenza infections were detected in those tests.
In Texas, owners of the 30 flocks within the five mile affected zone were able to move poultry or eggs only after obtaining a permit. Flocks in the affected zones underwent a minimum of four re-tests to the birds most likely to have been exposed to the virus. Strict biosecurity measures were utilized from the outset to prevent the potential transmission of disease from one farm to the other.
Texas made it clear that their teams would disinfect equipment, boots, vehicles and vehicle tires and sanitize and bag all disposable gear. From the outset, they urged poultry producers to take similar precautions and prohibit unnecessary traffic onto farms.
Poultry in the buffer zone, outside the impacted area, were all tested on at least one occasion. Did we carry out similar tests and retests in Canada? I do not know. It is not clear from the information that has been received or is available.
The CFIA website, on March 1, said 16,000 birds in British Columbia and that, it was suggested, would complete the process. Ten days later, as the minister himself indicated, he declared a control in the Fraser Valley to prevent spread of the disease. Ten days. Should we have acted more quickly? It certainly seems like the Texans acted faster.
Information continued to worsen and by March 24, CFIA decided to depopulate all remaining flocks in the high risk region. The 16,000 birds had grown to 275,000. Two weeks after that, on April 5, depopulation of all commercial poultry flocks and other backyard birds in the control area, a total of 19 million birds. Quite a progression: 16,000, two weeks later it becomes 275,000, and two weeks after that it becomes 19 million.
Did CFIA and the minister, and the department do the right thing, at the right time? I do not know. But I, like a lot of other Canadians, have every right to wonder. Texas restricted its kill to 7,000.
Like the mover of this motion that we are debating tonight, I am not an expert and I am certainly not a scientist; however, I would agree strenuously for an independent panel similar to what happened in the aftermath of the BSE issue to conduct an investigation at the appropriate time when this virus is finally contained to ascertain what the government and the industry did right and where we went wrong, if we went wrong at all, and what we would do in the future.
I have another example from south of the border. When the State of Delaware, on February 7, learned that two birds in that state had tested positive, all 12,000 birds in the flock were immediately destroyed. Not fast enough however before the disease had spread to both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Three days later an additional 73,000 chickens were slaughtered on an adjacent Delaware farm following one bird that had tested positive.
I want to quote what the secretary of agriculture for the State of Delaware said, right at the outset:
This now is a very, very serious matter. We have a multibillion-dollar industry at stake.
He urged reporters not to visit farms because it might spread the disease further. “I am asking and pleading for your cooperation”, he told the media.
Were similar travel restrictions placed in the B.C. hot zone? Perhaps. But I have not heard about it. It seems to me that I can recall seeing a lot of footage in the early days after the outbreak was first diagnosed in British Columbia of television cameras and birds that were being destroyed.
When the executive vice-president of the CFIA, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, appeared on March 30 before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, I do not recall him saying anything about restricting vehicles at that time in the affected areas for reporters or for other organizations. He did say the agency would reassess other biosecurity control measures at the appropriate time.
We certainly expect this agency to do that because when I look at the Delaware and Texas situations, it seems to me that the end result was a lot less severe than what was being impacted in British Columbia. Perhaps, because strict precautions were taken at the outset. It is all well and good for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food to say that when the outbreak was first diagnosed in British Columbia it was assumed that it was a low pathogen, and then it mutated into a high pathogen, but perhaps we should have assumed that it was a high pathogen at the outset and taken the appropriate strict monitoring controls at that time. Perhaps that is what Texas and Delaware did and we did not.
Poultry officials in Delaware hoped the combined announcements in that state, together with Texas and Maryland, now that the disease has been eradicated, would help persuade the 50 countries that have banned American poultry imports from those states to lift them.
The question must be asked, how long will it take our officials once we have finished all of our work and we are satisfied that there is no more positive test results? When we have eliminated 19 million, surely the outside world is going to look at that and say that this is a much more serious problem because Canada has eliminated so many more birds than the under 100,000, as far as I can tell, that were eliminated in all of the United States that had avian influenza this spring.
Certainly, the result is the need in Canada for more biosecurity and a great deal more surveillance as a matter of routine. My colleague from the Bloc Quebecois put that very well in his remarks.
The question I guess now is, where do we go from here? Compensation has been promised, but certainly the compensation program will have shrunk on the per bird basis because when we had 16,000 birds impacted there was talk about the value that would be placed on each bird. However, when we are slaughtering 19 million, obviously the cost per bird is going to go down very considerably.
Chicken and egg farmers would argue for appropriate and timely compensation. They would also point out the important role of their industries in providing nutritious safe food from Canada and the need for full cooperation and consultation among all levels of government and the industry. I appreciate that in terms of the government and I believe in terms of the industry we can say that there has been, as far as we can tell, full cooperation and coordination on this important issue.
The critical situation is a long way from being over, but when it is, we need compensation for the industry, and we need to reopen and push to reopen borders as quickly as possible. Again, I stress we need a review of what we did right and the mistakes that were made so that we can learn from them.
Personally, I have a very difficult time understanding how a relatively small outbreak on February 19 turned into a 19 million chicken depopulation two months later. As I said before, I do not think that I am the only one who feels this way. I hope and think that the appropriate questions will be asked at the appropriate time.
The impact on human health appears to be low and chickens that do not carry the disease are safe to eat as are the eggs that come from disease free chickens.
There is no question that the depopulation of the commercial and the backyard flocks is the best means of ending the crisis. However, despite the best efforts of government and industry, the disease has spread and spread rapidly. It has created a significant threat to a very profitable chicken industry, poultry and eggs, and has negatively affected those producers in a very serious way.
We are not doing terribly well over the last year or so when it comes to public health issues. I appreciate that with avian flu and the mad cow issue the chances of human beings being impacted by that in any serious way are almost negligible; however, in addition to those, we have had SARS and the West Nile virus. Our commitment to public health in terms of the money that has been pushed in that envelope has diminished greatly in recent years. It is a good thing that we have revitalized a public health agency announced in the budget and it is important that the new agency be up and running just as quickly as possible.
Canadians should be concerned that when this AI H7N3 strain was discovered and recorded on February 19, we were told that only 16,000 chickens and turkeys would be destroyed. That, as I said before, has now jumped to the incredibly high number of 19 million.
I referred the House to what the chief veterinarian had said. He said that humans were probably the main culprit in spreading the disease. I am reminded of the old Pogo cartoon, “We have seen the enemy and it is us”. We need to do things differently.
I say that in reference to a reporter that has been following this issue, who was aware of what had happened in the United States, in Texas, Delaware and the other states. When he confronted the Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials about the low numbers of birds killed in those states compared with the 19 million in Canada, the answer that he received from that CFIA official was apparently, “We do things differently here”. Obviously, we do things differently, but I am not sure that killing 19 million birds as opposed to killing less than 100,000 in total in the United States suggests that we are doing things right.
It is important to reassure Canadian consumers that neither the BSE issue nor the avian flu will cause individuals harm. Right now there is no risk to the general public and there is a need to ensure the public that the virus does not cause any changes to any genetic re-assortment with human flu. The health of barn workers and those who come into any contact with the birds is a concern. The minister indicated that a couple of individuals have had flu and another two have come down with conjunctivitis. Certainly, it is in sharp contrast to the avian flu in Asia, which has killed 22 human beings so far this year.
There are far more questions at this point than there are answers, but we do need to do an analysis and prepare. I think we will find that we need to do things a lot differently the next time that we have an avian flu outbreak in this country.
