Thank you.
First, I'll apologize to the vice-chair and the translator. I was fairly quick going through my opening comments.
To answer the second question first, third party delivery is as simple as this. Everyone recognizes that the most expensive form of program delivery is at the federal government. It's just the administrative costs associated with delivering a program. So as a consequence, when APF 2 programming was looked at, the environmental programming, OFA was actually the contracting party with the government. We agreed to deliver federal dollars to Ontario farmers, with a very clear set of parameters. The reason the government chose to go that route is, as I said earlier, that it is the lowest administrative cost, yet it provides all of the audit trail necessary for the government.
I did not talk about country-of-origin labelling. What I talked about was being able to label product to differentiate it from other products on the shelf. All over the wire service this morning they're saying that the wheat gluten that was laced with rat poison was redistributed and found itself a new home in six states in the form of a hog feed ingredient, and now they're scurrying to pull that type of product off of store shelves. That would never happen in Canada.
What we're saying is that every product.... I know in my organization, at last count, there are 207 different commodities produced in Ontario. Everybody is on the same page, saying allow us to differentiate our product in the marketplace.
The Canadian consumer has tremendous confidence in our food safety, in the CFIA. They may not all buy product of Canada tomorrow, but as we see more and more of these incidents, they will be looking to see what is clearly product of Canada and what is product of Canada that is maybe watered down and, I dare say, polluted with ingredients from other countries.
Today's is only one example. If you look back, the Hershey's plant in Smiths Falls was closed because of salmonella that was from an imported food ingredient.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.