Mr. Chairman and committee members, thank you for inviting me to make a presentation.
Food Processors of Canada is an association representing investors whose companies make such products as pizzas, dinners, entrees; they're all further processed products. We ship interprovincially and internationally. My members range from very small companies that are family run to larger companies, but none of them are publicly owned. They're all privately owned.
Our members' food is certainly blessed with a strong regulatory framework that facilitates and allows us to trade interprovincially and internationally. The rules support the categories so that we don't have problems from one province to another. There's a federal inspection system that is augmented both by retailer and customer inspections, certain audits, and of course in many of our plants, foreign countries come in and inspect as well.
Government standards from our point of view are minimum standards; they are certainly not maximums. Most companies exceed those. When they don't exceed those as a culture, you sometimes read about them in the newspapers. We can't afford that. We don't want to lose the trust of our customers, the retailers—they're unforgiving, as they should be—and more important, our consumers. We know that when companies breach the national regulations and something nasty happens, the whole category will certainly take a big hit and stay a low-profile category for consumers for months, such as we saw with listeria and sandwich meats. The market really holds everyone to account.
The government standards protect consumers and business, so it's important to have strong national standards. All of our regulations are NAFTA and WTO compatible. Imports are supposed to meet the same regulations that Canadian companies do. These set the rules for competition and consumer protection so that a processor knows that his competitor is playing by the same rules. Equal and consistent enforcement provides predictability and it supports investment.
This is kind of an interesting statistic. The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute said that on average, further processors buy 38% of farm produce. In Ontario and Quebec they purchase up to 70%. Any time the further processor gets hit in the marketplace, certainly if he has a fairly sizeable market, so do his producers.
From our point of view, if companies say that they can't grow their business because the processed product regulations or the meat regulations are too stringent, I think that if provincial governments feel that those companies are winners, then they should do what other companies have done and invest in their infrastructure and their food safety systems so that they could comply with national and international rules. What we would encourage is, if there are companies that are in a particular region and they can't seem to move to the next level, if provincial governments have faith in those companies, they should invest in those companies. That's one way to get around interprovincial trade barriers.
We certainly do not want to see a lowering of standards because that applies right across the board. Whatever standards we apply domestically, we apply internationally in packaged goods.
There is one thing that I would suggest, and it's a bit of an Achilles heel; it's a bit of a job killer. I think that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency does a good job of how it spends its money internally in regulating and auditing plants, but I don't think that it does a good job at how it protects consumers at the border. There's a large number of incidents of mislabelled, illegal products coming into this country, and that steals jobs from Canadians. If there was one shortfall in our regulatory framework, it would certainly be at the borders.
Mr. Chairman, that ends my presentation. I sent a fuller presentation. I'm willing to take questions at any point.
Thank you.