I'll try to be brief, Mr. Chairman.
Less prescriptive, again, in previous testimony relates back to the recommendations from this committee and the fact that there are elements of our program that have been viewed as having created a non-competitive sector--for example, issues of record retention on the part of producers at the farm level, or other programming activity in terms of the frequency of our inspection activities that are viewed by some as having negatively impacted the competitiveness of the Canadian sector.
There were two initiatives. One was a Canadian Federation of Independent Business report card on CFIA. We undertook to work with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to look at how we could regulate and deliver our activities in a way that still achieved the regulatory outcome but was less intrusive and less costly for industry to meet. Those were undertaken, as were the government's paperwork burden reduction Initiative to look at, again in terms of regulatory issues, the number of documents that have to be demonstrated to us in order for us to provide a document, for example. Could those be streamlined? Could they be brought together? Could the reporting frequency be reduced? Those are the sorts of initiatives that we undertook to do in terms of being less prescriptive.
Less oversight refers to those areas where in certain circumstances...for example, when we introduced the enhanced feed ban that we referred to with Mr. Dewar. Removing SRM at the top end of the feed system requires us to have less oversight further down the system, at the level of the producer. We don't have to go onto the farm to verify that the feeds they are receiving have had the specified risk materials taken away at that point. The oversight has shifted to the top end of the spectrum, if you will, to make sure that it never enters the system in the first place. The less oversight doesn't mean that overall the program is less effective or that we're reducing our commitment to the program; it simply means we're shifting the point at which we provide that level of verification.