Thank you, and thanks a lot for inviting us here.
We represent all the technicians and inspectors who work at CFIA, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Canadian Grain Commission, and basically most of the people under the agriculture portfolio, as well as those in education in the public service through the Canada School of Public Service, the academy at DND, and that sort of thing.
We are here to talk about Growing Forward. Originally, the comments were going to be focused primarily on the funding aspects of it, but I have added another piece, given some testimony you heard on Monday.
We are concerned about the way Growing Forward 2 is now shifting the focus of its funding. It is aiming at facilitating better collaboration of the private sector and the academic sector with public research. We don't have a problem with that. The concern is that the pie they're carving this up from is becoming smaller and smaller. I'm guessing that after the next budget it will be smaller still.
Part of the problem also with the new funding model they have is that you're looking at four- to five-year funding cycles. Bench research, the foundation on which agriculture in this country was based, including some of the best breeding programs in the world, is usually on anywhere from an eight- to 12-year cycle. It's becoming very difficult to plan projects, to get approval for projects. As we speak we have both researchers and technicians sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for funding approvals to come in. I suspect those are being withheld pending the upcoming budget, and based on the rumour mill, I'm not sure that funding will ever come.
We're very worried that long-term research, which is the forte of public research in this country, will suffer in the near future, given the funding dilemma. That type of research is the basis for a lot of Canada's ability to lead the world in terms of its agriculture. We're talking about things like promoting consumer confidence in products, and the ability of Canadians to produce those products. I guess one of the things we're concerned about is losing that edge. Right now we import approximately 30% of the food that Canadians eat. That's over double what the Americans produce, and some of that's based on climate. We're very concerned that if we start losing our basic research edge, we will start increasing the quantity of imports. I'm going to get to the problems associated with that later.
Right now, we're concerned that the innovation needed and encouraged by the concept of Growing Forward, in terms of enabling collaborating partners to come to the table, will in fact be undermined by the government's own ability to be a partner in that process. Right now, if you take a look at the way Growing Forward is designed and the way research funding is designed, it's on a bit of a tightrope. It wouldn't take much to push it over the edge and make it non-functional. That's our concern in terms of delivering on that public end of the research equation.
I know the committee has heard a lot of testimony about the value of public research and why it's needed and the nature of it and why it's expected that government should deliver that part of it. I really hope they take that into consideration with the next budget.
The testimony you heard the other day from CFIA kind of changed the nature of what I was going to say here. I've read the transcripts, and I hate to say this, but you've been seriously misinformed on a number of very important issues.
On the sunsetted programs and funds, I understand that's all still up in the air. It probably should be if they're really planning on doing away with the additional inspection that was brought about because of the listeriosis crisis. CFIA had been hoping to convince the USDA to lower its standards. Based on that lowered standard, they accordingly set funds to sunset on March 31, 2012. So all the funding that was set aside for additional daily inspection in the processing plants is now set to vanish March 31. We have been in touch with the USDA, and they have no intention of lowering their standards. In fact, they were shocked to find that there was a misunderstanding, in that CFIA hadn't been delivering to their standard all along.
CFIA has never completed a study on the impact of such a lowering of the standards. They began a study around the time they introduced CVS—the compliance verification system—and they shelved it. To the extent that the study was complete, it clearly showed that compliance was directly related to the frequency of inspector presence. Their own data showed very clearly and distinctly that the more often inspectors were present in the plants, the higher the compliance level.
We're seriously concerned, and we'd like to know why they are trying to reduce inspection frequency, when the information they have shows that it would be detrimental to food safety.
Regarding import inspection and testing, the committee was led to believe that the rules are the same for both imports and exports, that producers in Canada have a level playing field, and that this is administered evenly.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There is one set of rules, but they're certainly not applied the same way. Export inspection always get top priority, because when you don't do it, the exports don't move. Imports are discretionary, and they get slid off the table in many cases. The ratio is approximately 100% of exports being inspected to about 2% of imports being inspected.
If they think that is an equal playing field, I have a problem with their math. Predominantly, offshore imports are not looked at for human health and safety reasons, even when they are looked at; they're looked at for animal and plant health reasons.
As for dealing with the stuff at the borders, about which you were told the other day, this responsibility was in fact given to CBSA in 2004. CBSA employees made it clear at the time and still make it clear today that this work is not their priority. This has been confirmed in discussions I've had with the vice-presidents of operations at both CBSA and CFIA.
CFIA and CBSA had a memorandum of understanding that required interceptions of serious pests and diseases to be referred to CFIA for confirmation and advice. At the two busiest ports in the country, where I worked for 25 years and supervised this program for 15 years, we received absolutely zero referrals from CBSA once they took over the program. That is still the trend today. I confirmed this with a phone call to inspection staff at those busy ports literally minutes before walking into this room.
This presents to Canada a ticking biological time bomb that is being ignored by both departments. It also clearly represents an uneven playing field for Canadian producers. When products go down to the United States or to virtually any other country, they are inspected. They have inspection stations just across the border, all along the American border. In fact, the head of the organization that runs those inspection stations called me last week. He was alarmed at some of the talks going on involving the committee that is looking at opening the borders and at what effect this will have.
They do look at a lot. They find large numbers of non-compliance. With the small amount that we used to look at coming the other way, we found the same thing. We are concerned about that.
As for pesticides and chemicals being looked at and regularly monitored when coming in, that is quite frankly nonsense. The amount being sampled is minuscule, and the results come back months after the products are consumed. The targeted chemicals are not often the ones that are likely to be used by foreign producers anyway.
I was involved in supervising the sampling in that program, and I used to complain about the list of chemicals that PMRA was asking us to sample. I also worked with farmers for 30 years, and I know that a lot of the chemicals they were sampling for would never have been used. They were sampling, in our view, for the wrong ones. They were monitoring trends, anyway.
As I said, the program was never designed to be used to intercept products coming into the country. The only chemicals that are declared on imports coming into the country are the ones that we require to be applied in our regulations. We say that if you're importing certain products, you're required to treat for a certain list of pests, and we need verification from you that these have been professionally applied, etc. Those are the only ones they have to tell us about.
Shippers often—I mean “often” as in the majority of the time—add pesticides to avoid disease and infestation damage in transit, and these appear on absolutely no documentation whatsoever. I helped start a monitoring program for the wood packaging program that Mr. Mayers referred to on Monday. When we started that program, we expected to do some testing to verify that everything was fine from the chemical point of view so that we could stop doing testing. Instead, what we found was that most containers coming into the country had chemicals in them more than 100 times higher than the legal limit.
That monitoring is still going on. Every container that is inspected by customs is monitored for the presence of fumigants and chemicals before a customs officer is allowed inside it. When they do that they have professional pesticide applicators professionally aerate the containers before they're even allowed to look at them.
When CFIA inspectors do these inspections at warehouses they're aware of these risks, and they can put on gloves and dust masks. Very frequently when you open a box of produce there's a white powder all over it. It's usually cosmetic fungicide put on there so the stuff won't rot in transit. Once in a while you also get insecticide because it will be ant season. We can deal with that, but consumers and other workers inland can't; they don't even know about the risks.
Regarding Weatherill, there are still a lot of outstanding issues. I was surprised to see they feel it's all wrapped up. Their audit did not include us. We pointed out several major problems with the assumptions they used to do that audit, yet that audit still seems to stand. The technology Weatherill recommended.... A lot of inspectors still don't have access to computers, never mind the hand-held technologies that Weatherill was promoting.
Regarding red tape reduction--I'm trying to rush through them now--