Agriculture Committee on Feb. 28th, 2007

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to make an observation. Mr. Easter asked earlier who will be responsible. I know that it will not be the federal government, nor the previous government. Nor will it be the provinces. But there is one thing of which I am certain. It is the farmers who will pay, and as a result of the 1.9% increase in their revenue, personally, I think many of them will have a hard time paying. This is merely an observation.

During his presentation, Mr. Brooks from Saskatchewan said that, with respect to specified risk material, or SRM, their proposed formula was not used.

I would like to know what that formula was, Mr. Brooks, that the federal government... You were not satisfied with the formula that it gave you, but you had no choice but to accept it.

[Harvey Brooks]

We haven't been informed of the process by which the allocations were made. We understand the allocation for Saskatchewan is $11 million from the federal government and we have our 40% on top of that, but we don't know the process by which the interjurisdictional allocations were performed.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you. I have a brief question for Dr. Evans. Based on his document, I see that a feed ban was introduced in 1997. Then, in 2003, we had the BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, crisis. According to the Canada Gazette, we only began looking into this on December 11, 2004. Why did it take so long? It has been 10 years, yet we are only starting to work on this now. I have a problem with that.

Does it depend on the government? Does it depend on the Organic Crop Improvement Association, or OCIA? I am wondering who is to blame. I do not want to point at you, but we will need some culprits soon. I know who will have to pay, as I said.

Considering the document you gave me, I would not want to be in your shoes.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Thank you, honourable member, for the question.

As I indicated earlier, I don't think anybody should underestimate that the challenges encountered in 1997 with the initial feed ban are any less than the challenges we're facing today. The 1997 feed ban was in fact brought in against a backdrop where BSE had not been diagnosed in any domestic animals in Canada. There were concerns on both sides of the border about introducing costs that a number of the industry felt were inappropriate in the absence of an identified BSE risk.

In Canada's case, of course, we had identified BSE in an imported animal in 1993, which had been dealt with. Some felt we had overreacted by removing all the U.K. imports and all of the progeny and that the government had been overly aggressive in doing that. When those animals were tested and we could not find evidence of BSE, I believe there was significant resistance on the part of industry to go any further. Yet the conventional wisdom said we'd had one positive animal in the system and we needed to prepare ourselves to make sure that BSE could not become established and create a broader issue in North America.

We were also responding, in 1997, to a World Health Organization call for bans in all counties in order to protect the food supply. Those measures to gain the consensus to go forward were taken with significant difficulty--similar to what we've encountered in the current iteration of the feed ban. Having done that, I can assure you there was very little appetite on the part of industry or other sectors to go beyond 1997, until BSE was found in May 2003. With that finding it was demonstrated very capably to everybody that in fact there had been a degree of penetration to the system.

We felt that the proactive introduction of the 1997 feed ban had prevented a major epidemic from taking place, and it positioned us well to deal with this in a rational, responsible, and scientific way. Although there were severe economic consequences with the 2000 issue, which we still continue to work through, it is safe to say that in spite of recommendations from international panels, and in spite of efforts on a collective basis to get people to the table and recognize that it was part of our long-term strategy for full economic recovery, to get the consensus from producer to feed industries, to packers, to processors, to renderers, unanimity would never be found as to what needed to be done.

So efforts were put out to move this forward, with the consensus we see demonstrated around the table today. That did take time. As I indicated in my earlier comments, the reality was to do this in a way that would be environmentally sustainable, that would be effective at the end of the day, and not just be a regulation on paper that nobody respected.To give false confidence to consumers and false confidence to international markets is not the way we operate in Canada.

As a regulatory- and science-based agency, I think every effort has been expended--and I'm very proud of the efforts that have led us to where we are--towards implementation. There are challenges that remain, which have been well identified, but I sense no lack of commitment by anybody not to meet July 12. The commitment is there and it will be met.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Time is up, unfortunately.

Mr. Anderson for five minutes, please.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of comments to follow up on things that had been asked before. Mr. Easter asked a question about jurisdictions. I want to know what this is going to look like when we're done.

There would be a national standard that is applied provincially, and the provinces apparently have the funding control; regulatory controls would be under the federal government. Are we going to have different structures in each province? Are we going to have a national standard? What's it going to look like?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

If I could, very briefly, honourable member, at the end of the day we will have equivalent measures across the country. As I indicated, the preparation of this particular regulation was based on taking into account flexibilities that would exist based on existing infrastructure, so that no province was placed at a disadvantage over another and so that they could find those innovative solutions within their infrastructure to achieve the outcome that we were all looking for, in terms of managing the removal of the risk materials from animal feed.

So will there be a common look and feel in every province across the country in what's being done? Obviously not. There will be new technologies that may be appropriate and more easily adaptable in certain jurisdictions than in others. Some will opt for composting and reduction. Others will opt for doing other things within their programming, based both on the infrastructure of the industry itself and on the provincial infrastructures that manage the environmental side of it.

At the end of the day, I expect what we will see, in all fairness, honourable member, is that as some of these innovative solutions come to play, they will be seen as best practices. So if everybody is open to them, we will probably see a greater alignment over time. But again, the program was never designed to be prescriptive, so that everybody had to do the exact same thing. What it did provide was if everybody took appropriate measures, we would come to the same outcome, which was absolutely imperative.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I have a concern as well about the small abattoirs. I was on the committee in 2003 prior to BSE, and I remember having a couple of sessions when we were talking about the fact that the small abattoirs were going to be pressured by some new regulations. BSE basically set that aside for a while. In the last year B.C. has moved in some ways to make it more difficult for the smaller abattoirs to continue to function.

I am just concerned. I'm glad that some of the provinces seem to be reacting to that, but I'm concerned that this is going to be the final straw for some of these folks. The regulations have changed. There seemed to be a movement to force them to a standard that some of them couldn't have reached. BSE put that off. If anybody has any other comments on that, I'd be interested in them.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

I'll just make an opening statement and certainly allow others around the table in the provincial jurisdictions who have provincial abattoirs outside a federal establishment registration....

Certainly. from a federal perspective, one of the initiatives that we continue to invest a lot of time in at the federal-provincial-territorial level is a commitment to meet inspection reform in this country, to try to move us to standards that are not necessarily multi-tiered between federal standards--which have access to interprovincial movement and offshore--and what exists within the provincial jurisdictions for local opportunity.

There is a task force working at the federal-provincial-territorial agricultural level on a meat inspection and forum redesign, a major policy initiative that will bring standards into effect that some may say are less prescriptive than what they have been at the federal level, to take out of standards those issues that had nothing to do with food safety, and focus on the food safety outcome--which is really our mandate in terms of those aspects--and still meet our international commitments with other countries to provide that market access. But it very well—

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Can I ask you a question about that?

Sorry to stop you here, but we talked in the committee as well about having three levels of standards for inspections: provincial ones that would be acceptable, a code for across the country that wouldn't necessarily meet export standards, and the international standards. Is that what you're talking about?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

That's exactly what we're working toward at this point, honourable member, yes.

Obviously there are still short-term pressures, but hopefully as those standards become standard, that will provide additional opportunities for some of the smaller abattoir operators in the longer term that they haven't had in the past, so that they become equal players in certain areas that provide different opportunities for them.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

It's important that they survive until that time.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Understood.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Does anybody else wish to comment on that?

Mr. Schellenberger.

[Stan Schellenberger]

I have just a quick comment on the ability of the small abattoirs and even plants our size to compete, given the cost of $40 to $60 a head for rendering and land filling. We don't believe these new technologies are long-term solutions. These technologies are proven now, and they can be put into play relatively quickly.

The concern is whether can we compete with our major competitor in this business. In the United States they are not moving in this direction. They do not have these costs. We now have almost one million head of fat cattle moving across the border again. If we don't deal with this as far as cows and mature animals are concerned, a lot of the abattoirs are slaughtering those. With these extra costs, can we compete with our neighbours to the south if they come up here and try to buy these cattle away from us?

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Just on a couple of the other possible solutions, landfilling and composting, are the prions broken down by composting or by landfilling?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

No, prions are extremely indestructible, and even under certain pressure and temperatures, through rendering processes, they don't get 100% broken down. But again, the environmental standards in terms of deep burial and containment of those issues have been looked at. There has been a lot of research in that area done in Europe, with the experiences they've had there. Thus far, from a BSE perspective, we've not been able to demonstrate environmental contamination in terms of propagation of BSE and its spillover to other species, with extensive work and real-life experience in Europe. But it doesn't mean that we aren't continuing to look at that in terms of the interim solutions, and again, working with the provinces, since they have that environmental responsibility, to make sure that jurisdictionally we're not creating a longer-term problem for ourselves.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time is up, Mr. Anderson.

I want to follow up, because Mr. Horner mentioned taking some of the waste product coming out of the biodiesel plant they are proposing, after it's been through the biodigester, and producing methane, and that this product may be going into organic fertilizer. If that's the case and if it still has the prions in it, then there's no way that would qualify as a fertilizer; it's my understanding that SRM materials aren't allowed as a fertilizer.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Under the current circumstance, unless there can be a demonstration of a reduction in the prion activity, you're correct. The legislation is drafted in such a way that it provides the opportunity for further research to be done following these processes, to determine if in fact it does achieve a prion inactivation or deactivation process. So again, the legislation was written on a far-sighted basis to say, if we can look at these technologies and do the assessments to demonstrate whether they do achieve in fact a prion degradation, then it does open up the door for, again, looking at alternate uses of those products. So it is embedded in the legislation, to give us that capacity. But again, it will take time for the industry to work with us to develop the assessment tools on those technologies, to ensure that we're not creating a further environmental issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Good.

Mr. Donner.

[John Donner]

Just to be clear, the new technologies we're talking about are not simply composting. They are technologies that deactivate or otherwise take care of the prions. When we're talking about these new technologies we're investing in, it's not simply a composting technology by a different name. So we do need to differentiate the processes.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Okay.

Mr. Hubbard.

[Charles Hubbard, Liberal, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I came in late and probably missed some of this.

In the economics of it, it seems that for every producer, when he ships his animal to market, there is a liability because somewhere along the line there will be environmental costs to the producer. We've never been able to get much recognition of the fact that maybe every animal should be tested, or every carcass tested, for BSE after slaughter. It would have cost about $20 or $25 an animal. We've pursued this business about the big worry we have, and the Americans apparently now will have about $100 an animal advantage to our Canadian producers.

It's a bit of a mystery, Mr. Chair, why we pursued this route.

But the other thing that bothers me is this. Are we inventing the wheel? What do the Europeans do? What do the British do with their...? What do the Australians do? We know the Americans are apparently going to do nothing. So the economic question, in the long run, is if I were producing cattle, which I am, I'd rather ship them into Maine to be slaughtered than to send them up to Quebec because the animal will be worth more money at an American slaughterhouse than it would in a Canadian one.

So we have a really major problem, Mr. Chair, and I don't know what the solution is. But I can't help but be a bit frustrated, because the department consistently insisted that the testing of carcasses was never a door to be opened, yet the CFIA are saying now we have at least an $80 million problem for the federal government, probably a bigger problem for the provincial governments, and that's the road we're on. Will this road last forever, or is it something for the next five years?

Maybe, Dr. Evans, you or someone could try to answer some of my frustrations with the road we've followed. It's like Frost--the road you take.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Thank you. That's quite the analogy.

I'll address three very quick points, I guess, recognizing the time and the interests of the parties at the table.

On the first issue, of whether this will go on in perpetuity, I would just bring it to the attention of the committee that very early on we committed ourselves to learning from every other country that had gone through BSE. We wanted to figure out what they were doing that would be helpful to Canada, to get us to where we needed to be as quickly as possible.

In that regard, I think it's important for the committee to realize that, globally, as far as BSE management is concerned, the situation in the early nineties was this: in excess of 30,000 animals were found per year. And last year, although not all countries have finished their reporting, on a global basis less than 260 cases of BSE were found. So for anyone to say that the measures we're implementing will not achieve....

The timeframes can differ, depending on the intensity of your measures, but to say that we're not going to get this disease under control, either in Canada or internationally, is certainly not accurate. That five-year, ten-year projection....

All of our legislative efforts, all of our surveillance programming, all of our feed issues have always been associated with an automatic three-year review in terms of where we are, what we have achieved, and what we still have to do. That commitment remains in everything we're doing.

On the testing of all animals at slaughter, again, that has been looked at. I think we've been on record, with the packing houses themselves and those who saw that certainly as an advantage to getting into certain markets, that we were not obstructive to that process. If industry wanted to undertake to do testing for market purposes...although not for food safety purposes, because testing is not a food safety measure. No test of an animal can be deemed to be absolute in its entirety. So we would not divest ourselves of doing the SRM removal--from a human safety perspective, because from a public health perspective, that's the measure that guarantees you food safety—on all animals. The animal might never even have been exposed to BSE, but that way you're not potentially missing a single animal, whereas in testing, again, there can be human error. No test method can be 100%.

But we always had it on the table, with some of the new packing houses in particular who saw Asia as a potential market, that we would work with them; that we would define the testing standards that would have to be met; that we would make sure that the country they would be exporting to, if that was a corollary of their opportunity to access that market, was in agreement to industry doing that testing as a way of getting into that market. But we never wanted to confuse consumers into thinking that the testing of an animal guaranteed BSE safety. That was a mistake that was made in other jurisdictions. It resulted in further consumer confidence being lost in international market push-back. We have seen in Japan the moving away from testing of all animals at slaughter to a subgroup. Europe continues to look at those issues as well.

Again, I think testing is a tool. It's important for surveillance. It's important that we do testing to demonstrate how effective our measures have been. But it's not a panacea, and it comes with its issues as well.

[Charles Hubbard, Liberal, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you.