Finance committee  Good evening. My name is Bob Kingston. I am the national president of the Agriculture Union. Before going on a leave of absence to serve as an elected union officer, I spent 25 years as a CFIA and Agriculture Canada inspector, including 15 years as a multi-commodity supervisor.

Agriculture committee  Yes, we accept that.

Agriculture committee  Fair enough. When the increases you're talking about happened, unfortunately, they never showed up at the front line. That's the problem. When I talk about an increase in inspectors, I'm talking about front-line people who are actually making their presence known in the industry.

Agriculture committee  Well, that's simply not true. We've had those talks with them internally, and they've conceded the point.

Agriculture committee  What you're talking about--

Agriculture committee  They're the only ones that enforce humane transport of animals in this country--

Agriculture committee  --for all livestock, not just hamsters. Yes, it is.

Agriculture committee  Yes, it is.

Agriculture committee  Some of that would be also things like cantaloupe, which is considered generally low risk, but, as you know, can incur problems. I agree with everything you said about the harmonization and getting away from duplication of work. Ideally you would probably have them working toget

Agriculture committee  Of course, as an organization that is supposed to support the work of its members, obviously we try to fight that. But we also accept it. We understand that the devolution of a program to the province carries with it those jobs. We've been through many exercises like that. That i

Agriculture committee  Yes, that is what it's saying. We have an equivalency arrangement to do reciprocal audits with the Americans, but we send people to other countries on an issue-by-issue basis, a crisis-by-crisis basis. Usually if shipments are held up, or there's some emerging legal problem with

Agriculture committee  That's correct. For example, I mentioned Asian pears. We sent somebody over there because there was a very strong lobby from the Chinese to admit that produce into Canada. So we sent somebody over to figure out why they could not produce these pears without them being infested. A

Agriculture committee  Well, it's just not looked at. That's all there is to it. As I said, it's done on a survey basis, a very small amount, and the results come back long after. So you're absolutely correct; it could be happening that way.

Agriculture committee  Well, the Americans do inspect more than we do. That's why they have their inspection stations across the border, right from one end of the country to the other. We dabbled with that. We had a facility established, for example, at Pacific Highway border crossing, but that was aba

Agriculture committee  We've advocated for that for as long as I've been an employee. We understand the bias toward large producers, because a lot of the requirements of HACCP programs are very document-intensive and system-intensive. What we're completely behind is looking at other ways of how quali