Thank you, honourable member.
Mr. Chairman, I think the honourable member raises a very important point, and that is that the food supply is very much global. Part of the role of the CFIA, obviously, is to ensure that those products that enter Canada must meet the same standards as is required of Canadian producers. To that extent, the residue monitoring programs that we have in place, whether it be for chemicals, for anti-microbials, for heavy metals, or whatever the case may be, apply equally to imported products as to domestic. The design of those chemical residue programs takes into account not just those products that are approved by Health Canada, the pest management risk assessment agency, or others in Canada for use by Canadian producers; it also takes into account at the global level products that may have been approved in other jurisdictions and not approved for Canadian use. Under the chemical residue program applied to those products coming into the country, the same tolerances would apply whether those products were illegally imported into Canada and applied to Canadian domestic production or whether the production was done outside of Canada's borders.
To that extent, Mr. Chairman, I would emphasize very strongly that the work of our laboratory system at CFIA is tied intimately to ensuring that we have the test methods in place to test for not just those products approved in Canada, but products approved outside of Canada's jurisdiction. The complexity around this is in respect to the fact that these test methods must also be adapted to individual tissues: a test method that's used for meat, for example, may not be effective against dairy products, if you use the same test method.
We remain at the forefront, Mr. Chairman, in our alignment with international testing standards to ensure that we can verify that, for imported products, whether they be apples or other types of products, the chemical residue monitoring program applies equally as it would to a product produced in this country.