Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I'm the executive vice-president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, CCA.
On behalf of our 83,000 members from coast to coast, we want to emphasize that we consider food safety an absolutely critical issue for us every day.
I'm also the industry co-chair of the beef value chain round table and the industry co-chair of the agriculture subcommittee on food safety, which was created at the request of the various value chain round tables that represent industry in agriculture.
With me is Ryder Lee, who works in our Ottawa offices, and whom many of you know.
One of the bedrock pieces of our industry success and our brand promise—and you have seen this logo in many locations throughout the country, on many menus, the Canada beef advantage licensed logo that only certain people who meet our requirements can use—is our food safety system in Canada. Canada's food safety system as it currently stands is world-class. The system compares favourably to those in other developed countries, including the United States and European Union countries. Recently, as it was examined, it was considered one of the superior systems in the world. We believe that suggesting otherwise, as has happened recently, sends an inaccurate signal to Canadians that somehow foreign, imported foods are safer than Canadian food.
The reality is that all food for sale in Canada must be in compliance with rigorous Canadian food standards regardless of where it is produced. It is this strong world-class system that enables us to export our beef to much of the world; in fact, over half of what we produce is regularly exported. This export activity further enhances the safety of our system as it includes ongoing third party examination of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's processes and performance by a rotating list of importing countries. We probably are the most inspected country in the world.
We believe Bill S-11 is a positive step in the continuous improvement of Canada's food safety system. This legislative step complements the regulatory modernization process now going on at the CFIA. We support these dual steps as they are important to the competitiveness of beef farmers and ranchers, and to the modernization of meat inspection as we continue to move forward with new technology, improved testing procedures, and the statistical analysis that becomes part of a robust system.
As you heard on Tuesday, increasing uniformity of regulation, consistency of enforcement, and enabling stronger reaction to tampering and other issues that endanger our food are all positive steps this bill enables.
The ensuing regulations from this legislative change will be important. How meats and foods are traced through the system is important to primary producers as well, as we've learned in the past couple of months. We hope the contents of this bill and its ensuing regulations can enable improved response, remedies, and resumption of production where inadequacies are discovered in the future.
These are regrettable occurrences, but the reality is they do happen. How we respond usually has a longer lasting impact than the initial event itself and really has a great deal to do with how people view the credibility of our system.
This bill also amends the Health of Animals Act regarding the traceability of live animals. It's our understanding the live animal traceability is governed by the Health of Animals Act rather than this bill. The CCA has long been a supporter of national individual animal identification and actually brought forward the recommendation that created that system and has been working with governments as we look to implement the next steps of live animal traceability.
This bill fits into the bigger legislative and regulatory agenda. As part of the current agenda, we appreciate the government's commitment to a one-for-one regulatory regime where new regulations have to be offset by eliminating the same number of existing regulations. We're also highly supportive of the Regulatory Cooperation Council's work with the United States. We urge lawmakers to do what they can to ensure this undertaking lives up to its potential. We really operate in an integrated market in our industry in North America.
As regulations are drafted with these commitments in mind, we'll work with the government to ensure Canada's competitiveness is improved along with improving food safety.
We had previously mentioned a small concern in the language that could leave the door open one day to increasing the registration or licensing burden on producers of livestock. We will continue to monitor that. We are visiting with those particular provisions in mind to ensure that this bill does not add an extra degree of regulation that would be unnecessary.
We look forward to the questions, and thank you for this opportunity to comment on this legislative process.