My name is Jim Laws, and I'm an executive director of the Canadian Meat Council. I'm very fortunate that both Brian Nilsson and Brian Read are here with me today, both past presidents of the Canadian Meat Council and both running real beef operations in Canada.
As you know, we're the most important of the food sectors in Canada, employing some 67,000 people. And I too won't speak for long either, to make sure you have lots of time for questions.
We did also recently appear before your red meat sector committee, and we also appeared recently before the Subcommittee on Food Safety, and the House of Commons international trade committee. We've given you our recommendations on several issues, and we are sure that you'd rather we not repeat those to you today, such as removal of inspection fees, assistance for the high cost of compliance with the enhanced feed ban, and the need for enhanced slaughterhouse competitiveness, and not necessarily capacity. It is also understood that following your committee's recent visit to Washington and your meetings with different industry groups, you have further questions specifically related to the mandatory U.S. country-of-origin labelling regulations.
In 2008, we did work closely with the Government of Canada and we did fully support its submission to the Government of the United States on their interim final rule on mandatory country-of-origin labelling. The Canadian Meat Council did host a very successful one-day seminar in Toronto on September 10, 2008, where the American Meat Institute's vice-president of regulatory affairs and general counsel, Mark Dopp, was the main presenter. Fortunately for us, many of our members' meat products are sold to the hotel and food service market and to further processors of meat segments that are exempt from mandatorily declaring the country of origin on the labels.
Of course, late in 2008, we did fully support the Government of Canada's official notification to the WTO of its concern for this U.S. rule, and of course the recent letter by U.S. Secretary Vilsack to the U.S. industry asking them to voluntarily comply with his own version of the rule, which is stricter than the published actual final rule. It does concern us, and for that reason we did also recently support the Government of Canada in putting the United States on notice that it plans to reactivate its complaint at the WTO.
With that, we welcome your questions this morning.