One of the objectives of this bill is to encompass all elements of the food industry.
I must confess that we have not screened the bill to the nth degree to be able to answer correctly for ourselves that yes, everything is covered. We know some critical sectors are covered that weren't covered, but that's the objective. If you're going through the bill and you think that transportation really isn't covered as well as you thought it would be, then we need to correct that.
It's clear from the recent incident that to have safe food a lot of things have to go right. To have an incident and a lot of little things go wrong, that's the flip side of that coin. A lot of things have to go right. What do we mean by that? We mean that food safety has to be practised at every opportunity in the food chain. If we find out that by doing something at the farm level we improve food safety, then we would expect this bill to be able to enforce or regulate that activity. If it happens to be in transportation or distribution and we find out that in distribution there's an abuse occurring, with respect to temperature for example, or at retail there's abuse with respect to temperature and we want to correct that, we hope that this bill will give us the legs, so to speak, to address those kinds of situations and ensure that a lot of little things go right all through the chain.
That being said, the only thing we think is missing from the bill that we haven't mentioned is an appeal mechanism. There's been reference made to a tribunal of some kind, but certainly there's nothing in the bill where we can appeal a decision the CFIA has made. Given the additional powers, an appeal mechanism would certainly be wise to put in place. As you encourage people to make decisions, there are times when mistakes are made, and we recognize that. But a mistake in food safety can result in a firm going bankrupt and product being recalled, and millions of dollars wrongly assessed to a particular company. That affects our competitive situation. That's why we mentioned the mechanism, the offset to the liability statement in the bill. An appeal mechanism would make eminent sense in terms of addressing the balance in the bill. It's very much giving powers to a certain group of people. We agree with that as industry, but at the same time, we have to recognize there can be mistakes made. I certainly have knowledge of firms that have gone bankrupt as a result of mistakes made in food safety analysis.
This is not an exact science. It's very much a culture. We all agree we need to work toward that end, but at the same time, we've got to make sure there's some balance.