Health committee  Thank you very much for the question. I think there are a number of positive things the agency is proud of. Over the last number of years there have been significant investments in the area of food safety, launches of enhanced oversight programs to deal with fresh fruits and veg

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I am going to ask Mr. Mayers, the agency's vice-president of policy and programs, to answer that question.

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. Actually, there are a number of questions there to respond to, so we'll try to work our way through. I think the first one dealt with the actual issue of the budgets and changes in the budgets year over year. I'm actually going to ask D

Health committee  Inspection numbers on a day-to-day basis can fluctuate fairly largely, depending on needs and those types of things. But when you look at inspection numbers in the agency over the last seven years, they've increased by 19%. Almost every year there has been a steady increase in th

Health committee  I don't have the 2011 number with me, but I do have it for 2012 and 2013.

Health committee  The total number of staff in 2012 was 7,291. In 2013 it was 7,119, which is a slight decrease. But I would also point out that the number of the inspection staff increased over that same time period; it went from 3,534 to 3,577. So you're right, there was a reduction in the ove

Health committee  There actually was a slight increase.

Health committee  I don't have the specific numbers, because we don't break it down that way in our counting; often inspectors will do multiple tasks, working on different areas. But we have increased our inspection in the meat program as well as in a number of other areas across the board. Overal

Health committee  There was an international audit done in 2009 that identified a number of areas where Canada was doing inspection in various meat processing facilities for both domestic and international use. One of the audit findings concluded that there needed to be more presence in terms of t

Health committee  I'm going to ask Paul to respond to this one.

Health committee  Thank you for the question. There are a number of areas in which I think the government has made some significant investments in terms of improving Canada's overall food safety system, which, as you mentioned, is already highly regarded throughout the world. I think some of the

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. I'm going to ask my colleague Paul Mayers, who is our associate vice-president in policy and programs, to expand a bit on that.