The labelling process in Canada is what we call a registration process, and in many ways $100 is a bit of a cost-recovery type of thing. There have been discussions with the government about getting out of that registration process. But one of the interesting things is that meat labels are 95% compliant with Canadian labelling registration, and as you look at the others—dairy, vegetables, and you keep going down and down and down—vegetable labels also tend to be very compliant, because vegetables require a registered label if they are in processed form. But the moment you get out of the registration world, the compliance levels drop.
Now, one of the interesting things about this is that when it comes to a meat product coming across the border, you cannot get that meat product across the border unless you have registration in Canada. So the registration unit is very good at putting Canadian law into the U.S. by saying you can't export that product into Canada unless you meet Canadian labelling rules. As a result, we're getting very good compliance from U.S. companies in that regard.
Now, what do we do to get rid of that frustration? How do we get level with our competitors? Well, maybe we could shorten up the registration process, so that it doesn't take three weeks. We could simply register our labels, send them in to CFIA, and get a number back, and then you could have random checks on those labels to see if they're compliant. So you don't have to check every label; you simply randomly check them.
By doing random checks—and this is very much the HACCP type of approach that we've used in the past, and is very scientifically supportable—you identify those areas where there are problems pretty quickly. But let's not just do it to the registered labels we cover today. Why don't we have all Canadian labels registered? Why shouldn't a retailer, every morning when they're making all those labels, have those registered, so that if we do have a problem, we can come back and say they wilfully violated the Canadian rules, or no, they didn't, because they knew what the Canadian rules were? I say this because the way we have set up our labelling regulations, it's the responsibility of the manufacturer to know the rules.
All right? So the government should just provide oversight, and that may be the answer.