Thank you to the committee for inviting us here today.
I commend the decision of the committee to inquire into the goings-on at CFIA and the state of the food safety system in Canada. I encourage you to seek out the document in question, and I encourage you in your deliberations to hear from the scientists and regulatory professionals who have been telling the institute for many years about their concerns for their capacity to do their work and live up to the expectations placed on them as public service employees serving the public good.
I'm not going to take a lot of time to explore food systems abroad. I simply want to point to the irony that the direction suggested in this recent CFIA document, the direction that Canada is headed in, comes at a time when the United States is emerging from a long experiment in industry self-regulation and minimal government oversight, not just in the area of food safety but, in fact, consumer product safety as well. There have been recent efforts to strengthen dramatically the capacity and authority of the federal government in the United States to act on behalf of the interests of consumers, whether in regard to toys or food and drugs.
Speaking of the Food and Drug Administration alone, between 1994 and 2008 the agency lost over 1,300 employees and nearly $300 million in appropriations to inflation. The agency's field inspection force suffered in particular in the area of food. In 1973, the FDA undertook nearly 35,000 food inspections; by 2006, that number had dropped to under 8,000. This was as the share of imported food, drugs, and medical devices soared. At the same time, the number of import inspectors had plunged, from 530 in 2003, to under 400 just three years later.
Just recently, last year, a former FDA associate commissioner admitted that, as he put it, “The FDA has so few resources, all it can do is target high-risk things, give a pass to everything else and hope it is okay.”
Importantly, for our purposes, the FDA's own science board pointed out that the FDA had lost the scientific capacity to fulfill its mission because the workforce didn't have the resources and the means to undertake its work. It had recruitment and retention challenges, and there was inadequate funding for professional development and the like.
In the wake of some recent food-borne illness outbreaks in the United States in spinach and in jalapeno peppers and tomatoes, sickening more than a thousand people across 41 or 42 states, Congress has moved to introduce legislation—and I'll speak to the FDA in particular—to reinject $775 million to strengthen food safety efforts, including increasing the number of inspections and addressing their food traceability system, which is generally agreed to be in disrepair.
I'll just leave it there and entertain any questions that the committee might have.