It's a very good question. The trouble is that the CFIA have a sort of identity crisis. On one hand we expect the food industry to take full responsibility, with the CFIA just as overseers, but on the other hand, people suggest that the CFIA should be very hands on, doing front line inspection. Anybody coming in from outside probably wouldn't appreciate, as you said, the schizophrenic sort of way they have. The reality is that the roles of the CFIA are ill-defined.
This was brought up by the XL Foods affair. There were inspectors in the plants saying that they have a strict regime of duties to perform who seemed to be oblivious to the other things going on around them, whereas consumers may expect the CFIA to be more involved.
I think an internal audit would be much more successful than an external one, for the simple reason that the CFIA has to understand what its real role is. This is one of the benefits of the act, that it clearly defines that.
In terms of the second question about being a jack of all trades, I always say that people who are very confident about being able to do something might have some deficiencies in knowing the full scope of the problem.
This really comes down to what we expect of the inspectors and if we expect the inspectors to be very hands on and to be able to identify many different hazards. We could use an example of veterinarians trying to inspect animals coming in diseased. Would we expect them to look at a lettuce to see whether there is a potential pest that could devastate our agriculture?
Certainly being a jack of all trades is an issue. If we go down that route, whereby we have inspectors inspecting a diverse range of commodities, then our sense is that the CFIA will be there just to monitor paperwork and will have nothing to do with the front line. That's my opinion.