My organization began in 1947; therefore, we've been making presentations to the House for 65 years.
I'd just like to start by making a comment on Growing Forward—I don't know whether they call it Growing Forward 1, or whatever it is, but Growing Forward as opposed to Growing Forward 2. I thought it was a very good program. I'm not going to deal with it minutely, but it's the best program that I've ever been involved in that actually accommodated federal, provincial, and major stakeholders all as a unit.
I know over the period of years that I've been involved with it, which is from its inception, I've met many times with people I wouldn't have normally come in contact with. There were a lot of side issues that were resolved outside the meetings, and we had some influence on the way that program proceeded.
I'm assuming that the next Growing Forward program will be somewhat similar. The only comment I would give is that I would like to see some caution used in regard to the way we engineer things. We don't want to get to the stage of not giving farmers or consumers enough input. I think we can all hold our own if we're at the meetings, and I think that works well from the point of view of my association.
Consumers are mainly interested in food at the table level, and I think that's probably what you're heading to, what we're getting at here. Safety is the issue. We've just done some polling, and food safety is the number one issue for consumers, whether it's coming into the country or whether it's manufactured here. We do have control over what we produce here, and I think there are a lot of things we have to do that we're not doing. We have to prevent—and take more action to prevent—disasters.
An item we're involved in at the moment is irradiation. Irradiation, oddly enough, was invented in Canada. It was sold to a company in Vancouver some 20 years ago, and it has never yet been used on food in this country. We know from our own research that there are quite a number of people in Canada who would like to have irradiation available so they can be absolutely sure that there are at least some bugs that aren't going to get to them.
Price also comes into what consumers want. That was the second biggest issue. We all know there's something wrong when you can buy a gallon of milk in the United States for half the price of what you can buy it for in Canada. You can buy chicken for half the price. This is particularly exacerbated when the dollar reaches parity, which it has. We've been fighting that one for five years, but the reality is that you can still buy these products for half the price across the border. We'd like to see something done on that issue. I have absolutely no idea what you do these days with that.
I don't think I can completely drop away from supply management. We're very familiar with supply management, but I don't want to go into that too much at the moment.
We're big exporters. I think consumers are also interested, and they're telling us that they would like to have the same standards applied to food that's consumed locally and manufactured locally as to what is brought in. It's a two-edged sword; you have stuff coming in and you have stuff going out.
At the moment we get the impression—or people believe—that Canada's exports get far more inspection attention than do the foods we eat here. We've had one big scare: the listeriosis one is the one I'm thinking of. I think we were very fortunate there. We only had 24 or 25 people killed—if you want to talk about it in that language—but we could just as easily one day have a thousand. I think those things have to be taken care of.
I'm going to cut what I was going to say a little bit short here, but I certainly would like to answer any questions. I can assure the honourable members that I'm in touch with consumers on a daily basis. I think we have probably the most accurate gauge in Canada, from an organizational point of view, as to what consumers want and would like to see.
Again, as I say, I'm very much in favour of Growing Forward 2 as long as it has the ability to be tempered by the people who interact in the coming together of the provincial government, the federal government, and major stakeholders.
Thanks.