Thank you, honourable member.
The discrepancy with other standards does not really present itself in terms of violations of international agreements. Our work at Health Canada is to ensure that the standards that are in place are protective to human health. As was mentioned by previous witnesses, we have in effect two standards, the two parts per million for soft wheat and the one part per million for, again, soft wheat, destined for essentially baby foods.
Those standards, as was mentioned, are actually under review simply because they were set a number of years ago, over 20 years ago. We have new scientific evidence that is at hand for Health Canada scientists. The scientific evidence that is available both on the hazards associated with this toxin and also on the level of occurrence of the toxins in the Canadian food supply warrants such evaluation. The evaluation is actually right now under way, and that's what Health Canada, right now, has committed to doing as part of its program on microtoxins. We have, right now, a plan to complete the scientific evaluation during the course of 2010, and at that point we will be able to make a recommendation on whether the standards that were previously set are adequate and if essentially additional standards may be warranted for other food commodities—because again, those standards cover only two commodities, or a very narrow number of food products. That's what the assessment will help us determine.
In the meantime, when there is no standard, the previous explanation that I have provided to the committee on how we manage collectively with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, any type of health risk that may be inherent to the presence of contaminants, including natural toxins, that type of process would apply.