Agriculture committee  As was brought up in the earlier testimony, there's been a focus on food waste. Data from the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef shows that downstream, or from the packer on, of 1.24 kilograms of boneless beef, only one kilogram actually gets consumed, so there's a loss there.

Agriculture committee  When it comes to marketing and being local, I definitely think there's some room to work there. From the cattle industry's perspective, when you're talking to, say, the Ottawa area and the local consumer base, they're going to want the types of products that Canadians enjoy—steaks, roasts, and hamburger—but there are a lot of pieces of the animal that Canadians don't particularly enjoy either.

Agriculture committee  Could I add something? Getting back to Canada's food guide, we presented some research from the University of Alberta around the updated guide's focus on eating less red meat. We framed it to have a bit more of a science background, but we were also framing it more positively.

Agriculture committee  I'd just add quickly that when we're making regulations that have an effect on animals within Canada, we want to make sure that they're being based on what actually is happening in Canada to ensure that the outcomes for the animals within the country are the best and we're not taking something from another jurisdiction that doesn't have as much of an application in our own country.

Agriculture committee  Yes, with the research benchmarking the cattle industry has done—as you mentioned—we're having over 99% success at a national level. The analogy I use is that we're playing darts and we're hitting the bull's eye 99% of the time. If we have wide-sweeping changes to the regulations—or, in the analogy's case, our technique of throwing that dart—we're less likely to get closer to 100% and more likely to get further away.

Agriculture committee  I'd just echo those comments. In 2013 there was a survey and a kind of pre-consultation questionnaire that went out, and the CCA did provide comments to that. At value chain round tables and meetings like that, we kind of got an update that they were being worked on but the details weren't in detail.