Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Well, I am, but I'll tell you, it is also rewarding to go to the grocery store--and I'll use the example of tomatoes because sometimes it's hard to find Ontario or Canadian tomatoes in the store--and I always ask the produce fellow who's working there where the Ontario ones are.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  There is no one consumer. The position I'm at in my life right now, with the children finally gone--and I think they've quit coming back—

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  --I can afford the luxury of paying extra for food, because I know the value of it. But I have to tell you honestly, when we were paying off the mortgage and raising four kids, if we were going to have tomatoes in the winter, they couldn't be Ontario tomatoes. So let's just be realistic here.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  So there was a question in there?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  On producer compensation, this is exactly why government needs to be involved and working with industry to set up these programs to help industry design and implement these food safety programs. Regardless of what kind of disaster program you can come up with in this country, until we have the traceability in place to mitigate that damage in a recall situation, and the food safety protocols in place by commodity, then the damage is going to be phenomenal.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Yes, I did mention in the presentation that there is no premium for food safety. That's why we're here today: to make sure we continue some of the good work we've done. The Canadian On-Farm Food Safety Working Group worked with commodity organizations to establish food safety protocols, auditable protocols, for some commodities that were able to do it.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  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.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I believe that food is allowed to come into this country if it meets the production standards in that country. Let's use the States as a very easy example. There are crop protection products that are licensed in the States and that are not licensed in Canada, and yet that product can come into Canada.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I don't know what regulations are commodity by commodity in the States, but I do know, on a traceability basis, when BSE hit in Canada, we were ahead of the States in being able to trace our animals. We've improved phenomenally since then, but as far as actual regulatory requirements went, we were ahead of the States at that point.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you very much. I'm here today representing the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. I sit as co-chair of their Food Safety Committee. Let me start out by saying that the Canadian agriculture and agrifood industry does produce safe, high-quality food to sustainable environmental standards.