Thank you for your testimony and for being here.
I'm a bit surprised to hear you say that you have a supplementary budget of $17.8 million and that part of that amount isn't allocated to an obvious food safety need. I know it's very important to conduct audits and ensure the traceability and safety of products manufactured in the country. However, year after year, you come and tell us about problems concerning products from outside Canada, such as melamine in pork, spinach, carrot juice and so on.
Every time, I ask you—and I'm not the only one around this table who does it—whether you have enough resources to verify the safety of products from outside the country containing substances that are not allowed or used in Canada but are elsewhere. We're of course talking about China, India and other emerging economies. I'm surprised to see that part of this amount isn't being allocated to foreign inspections. Do you have sufficient resources to conduct these checks? I always find it a little hard to get an answer to that question.
I'm going to talk about a completely different issue. Did the agency save or spend money when it decided to exclude the Fédération des producteurs de pommes du Québec from the process of allocating departmental exemptions? You decided to offload that responsibility to the Association des emballeurs de pommes du Québec. How can you explain that decision when it's only Quebec that will be proceeding in that manner? The Fédération des producteurs de pommes du Québec has been handling the issue of marketing in the event of shortage. Suddenly the agency decided that this component was the packagers' responsibility. That isn't how it works in the other provinces. Can that decision be attributed to a financial or other reason? That's never been explained to us.