All right.
Around the National Farm Animal Care Council table we very purposely have had this conversation about whether codes are voluntary any longer. If you look at the modern codes, codes that have been developed through the National Farm Animal Care Council, you don't see that word. They're called codes of practice and they do contain requirements and recommended practices. Certainly recommended practices are voluntary. The requirements refer to an industry expectation, whereby industry, or the collective that sits around the code development committee, has said this is no longer acceptable and so thou shalt not, but they also can refer to regulatory requirements themselves.
In addition, a number of our provinces are referencing the codes of practice in their provincial animal protection legislation. Manitoba is one example of a province that uses the codes in its animal protection activities. Newfoundland is probably the most recent one that's also done that.
Talking about their being optional in any way, increasingly that's less and less the case. Plus, as both Robin and Tim have pointed out, a number of commodity groups have developed animal care assessment programs, and they are making some of those programs mandatory. They're basing them on their codes and saying you have to follow your code to market your product.
Those are the reasons we say it's not accurate any longer to refer to them as voluntary codes of practice, because efforts are increasingly under way to make them less and less so. The points is that these are a national understanding of what we expect around animal care requirements and recommended practices. To build that common understanding and to make sure that all the different users of the code are using the code in the same way, we have to make sure that everyone understands what's expected and what might be optional in the recommended practices.