Mr. Chairman, thanks for the question, and thanks for the compliment on how well we do in protecting the Canadian public on food safety issues.
With respect to the issue of cost recovery, Mr. Chairman, the agency has been in the business of recovering part of its costs since the early nineties. At the time, the agency--it was not the agency then but the Department of Agriculture--got its budget amputated by roughly $50 million and was requested to compensate for that with cost-recovery fees. We did that at the time, and pretty well all sectors that the agency was dealing with were charged a certain amount in cost-recovery fees.
At the time, at their highest proportion, the fees came to roughly 20% of the agency's costs, but from 1993, let's say, to 2007 the agency was subject to a freeze on cost recovery; therefore, there's been no increase in fees. We feel that at this point in time they represent a little less than 10% of our regular costs. In fact, we haven't increased them, but overall, if you look at the percentage, they have actually decreased.
When we did the cost-recovery exercise and started negotiating with different industry sectors in the early nineties, we did some comparisons with the United States for some of our programs, the majority of programs that are related to exporting. I remember looking at the meat hygiene program as an example and comparing what the U.S. charged and what we charged. Even though the services we targeted were not necessarily the same as on the U.S. side, we found there was a degree of equivalence between their fees and ours overall.
We can provide the numbers. I don't have them with me today, but we can do this if you want.