Thank you.
I'm going to have some abbreviated comments as well. I'm here in a bit of a different role than usual. I co-chair the national steering committee for public trust. I think it's interesting that my co-chair is from McDonald's foods. It's an indicator that the issue of public trust is a lot broader than just primary production. There's a lot of work being done in the different sectors—Susie has been working on the grain sector—looking at how they actually do the right thing, prove what they're doing and communicate it.
This issue has been building steam over the last few years. I think the ability of social media to put out misinformation about farming practices, how we care for our animals, how we grow our crops and the types of products that we're using has presented a challenge.
The public trust steering committee basically was just an offshoot of a meeting that was held in P.E.I. with all of the agriculture ministers and the federal minister. Governments and industry realized that we needed to start getting in front of some of the misinformation that was out there in order to ensure that we maintain the confidence of consumers.
We've worked through a process. CFA was actually granted some funds last year, and Susie has been working on the project to take a look at the tools that are required and the information we need to collect and look at putting together an overview of where we should be going from here.
I think one thing that became clear is that it is a lot broader than just one commodity. Everyone is involved and there was a need for co-ordination. I think there's a responsibility of individual commodities to deal with the public trust issues that they have. Over that, there's a need to coordinate some of the responses and take a look at best practices and things like that when you're addressing the public trust issue.
You have written comments that we presented. I won't go through them, but I did want to touch on the fact that, coming out of this discussion, we're looking at finding a home for some group to take leadership in running this file and playing the coordinating role. Kim is speaking next and the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity has been identified as one of the groups that could take on that role.
We need, though, to build a governance system underneath that, so that all of the different commodities and all of the different players—processors, retailers and the general public—are connected into this discussion as well.
I think there's an opportunity for us to share information back and forth between commodity groups, to take a look at the best practices and take a coordinated approach, so that we're providing good information to the public about what we're doing rather than trying to put out fires every time there's some type of complaint or something comes forward. That is the goal.
As I said, I'm keeping my comments abbreviated, but you do have the written comments. I look forward to questions if we have time.