Evidence of meeting #33 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was supply.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
All right.
You also talked with a couple of our colleagues in terms of the CFIA, the inspectors, the modernization, and certainly the future, and you see the CFIA inspectors having a different role. Has that been tossed around in your organizations, and have some thoughts been put forward as to what those future roles might look like?
Executive Director, Canadian Supply Chain Food Safety Coalition
We see more and more of them having a role in, what we would call, an audit function, as opposed to an on-the-line inspection function. Whether the title of their job changes or not, we see that happening. As that happens, there will be requirements for new competencies, new skills, new knowledge, and new capacities to apply them. That's something we're seized with, from the perspective of the food safety auditor.
We have had government officials participating in our first two workshops, one of which just concluded last month. The results of that seem to be likely to take us down the road of further work in that area. It was testing the water, but there was I think a fairly.... I shouldn't get ahead of my members, but there's a lot of support for improvements in the private sector and the public sector, at the federal, the provincial, and the territorial levels, in terms of the competency of those key people who are doing that work around food safety management systems.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
How much time do I have left? I have a short time.
Mr. Holmes, I have a couple of questions. I'll try to be really quick.
Witnesses have told us that the “buy local” campaigns are not where the future of the agriculture sector is. Would you agree, or if not, why not? Perhaps you could also touch on the certification for organic versus natural products, because a lot of consumers, I understand, get confused about those two terms.
Executive Director, Canada Organic Trade Association
Thank you for the question.
What's important when you're talking about the claim of being local is that, again, we don't have a common definition. The same thing goes for “natural”. There is no real standard or definition by which that exists.
I'm calling in today from Moncton, New Brunswick, where you can't really get much in terms of local meat. It's raised here, but it's shipped to Quebec to be slaughtered and then it's shipped back. So the question for the consumer is whether that is actually local in their minds anymore. Establishing a basis by which to understand the term “local” is the first point.
In terms of “natural”, this is a word that means almost nothing in marketing terms. Yet consumers are typically encountering it, often right beside an organic product, which the government has used great resources and gone to great effort to actually codify and support with regulation and enforcement.
Consumers see “natural”. It sounds good. It has a good visceral meaning for them. They may choose that, because it may be marketed a couple of points below organic by the retail establishment. But in many cases, it is basically the same as the conventional product, which is at a much better price.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Thanks very much, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Chambers. Thank you very much for your time today. We appreciate it. We will be going further in-depth into our report, and hopefully, you can follow up. Thank you again for that.
Before we go, could I ask Mr. Valeriote, Mr. Allen, Mr. Hoback, and Mr. Lemieux to hang back for a couple of minutes afterwards? I just want to have a short discussion.
Thanks very much. The meeting is adjourned.