Agriculture Committee on May 28th, 2019

[Martin Pelletier]

The PigTrace program was created by a regulation of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or CFIA.

Only certain people have access to the data, so CFIA operations people. As for the management of PigTrace, the Équipe québécoise de santé porcine doesn't have access to the data.

Obviously, in a crisis situation, we want the agency or database manager to know the movement of pigs from an infected farm and to have quick access to the data. This would facilitate disease control and provide information on the epidemiological links between the infected site and other potential sites to contain the disease as quickly as possible.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Okay.

You also referred to the zoning system. We know that an agreement was made last week with the United States. Mr. Dickson also mentioned a zoning agreement with Japan or South Korea.

Is this important for you too? Are your export markets in these countries as well?

[Martin Pelletier]

Yes, these are all potential markets. They are the same markets that Mr. Dickson mentioned.

As we said, there are 80. Of course, they aren't all of the same importance. Our interest is to have as many prior agreements as possible that recognize zoning with as many of our trading partners as possible. If some people refuse to trade during a crisis, the more potential opportunities we have, the more it will minimize the impacts on the sector and the need to reduce livestock.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I have one last question about market diversification.

You represent producers. Do you also work with processors? We may have access to markets in Japan and China. Do you work with processors to make sure all our eggs aren't in one basket? If a country is ever affected, it would be felt more by our producers.

[David Duval, President, Les Éleveurs de porcs du Québec]

The EQSP board of directors is made up of producers and processors. There are also the mills. Everyone is working hard to find solutions. In our opinion, it is important that everyone talk to each other and that there is good coordination when we want to put something in place.

As Mr. Dickson said, the Japanese market is the most lucrative market for Canada. Clearly, it is essential that we maintain those markets. It took us a long time to reach those markets and to achieve some mutual respect. We have previously experienced the loss of other markets in Asia. It takes years to rebuild that. So we must not lose the markets.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. Dickson, you've mentioned an interesting stat. Regarding the diversification of our markets, you mentioned that if Japan were to close, for instance, that would be the end for pork producers in Manitoba.

On our side, you mentioned that the BRM programs are not responding, that they're not necessarily answering those types of issues. What are you suggesting? I know those conversations happen every five years with the provinces. How do we move forward from here in terms of ensuring that our BRMs are responsive?

[Andrew Dickson]

We're having discussions with the provincial government right now to look at how the BRM programs or a suite of programs could fit in. The challenge we're facing is that these programs affect all of agriculture. When you make changes in AgriStability, you also affect how it would apply to crop producers and so on. It gets very complicated.

We went through a downsizing with country of origin labelling in 2008. We went from shipping 110,000 baby pigs a week to about 70,000 to the United States. We've gone through a herd reduction exercise. The problem we faced at the time was that many producers ran out of cash. How do you design a program that puts some cash in place that can be accessed by producers, so that they have an orderly process in place to downsize and follows strict, humane practices?

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Drouin.

Mr. MacGregor, you have six minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Pelletier and Mr. Duval, I'll start with you. We had representatives of the Canada Border Services Agency appear before the committee during our last meeting. They have allocated $32 million over the next five years for detector dogs. I asked them about the rate of illegal pork product detections. Their detector dog service teams were responsible for just over 5,000 searches and they made 7,000 interceptions of prohibited food. Of that, about 25% to 30% of all of those food, plant and animal seizures were pork products. Those are pretty shocking statistics.

You have called for a faster implementation. Do you have any details? Do you want more money or just a faster timeline? Can you provide this committee with an update on what you would like to see specifically, so that we can include it as a recommendation?

[Martin Pelletier]

I guess we didn't see any timeline on the implementation, so I don't know if they're spread over five years for the implementation. Our message is that we know it takes a few months to train those dogs, we fully understand that, but given the urgency of the situation, they should look at shortening the training or doing as many as possible in the shortest time frame so that they are implemented.

We understand that there are few dogs, and they have to focus on airplanes from Asia, but since the beginning of the year there are already four new countries that have been infected: Cambodia, and now they talk about North Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia. If it continues to spread to the Philippines and others, there are even more travellers. Our message is to do it as quickly as possible. Probably the agency services are in a better position to determine the best number of dogs they need to do the job.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

You also made mention of backyard pigs and food waste. I have a lot of constituents in my riding. It's a pretty big rural area with a very long history of farming. A lot of people like to raise two or three pigs for their own family's use. They find it a good way to get rid of old food scraps. Is there anything in particular you want to identify as a more specific recommendation for the keeping of backyard pigs?

[Martin Pelletier]

Our main concern there is if people use food scraps. I guess if the meat is from Canada, then the food scraps are not of much concern because we don't have the disease yet. The issue is if one family receives a visitor bringing some contaminated pork product carrying the virus from one of those infected countries. It just takes one event to bring a disaster. It would go in the food scraps of those pigs.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Dickson, we had the Canadian Pork Council appear before our committee at the last meeting, and they did talk in some depth about the possibility of creating a pork promotion and research agency. Do you have anything to add to that? Basically in the context of African swine fever, do you think there are resources or avenues for co-operation that would be more effective under such an agency? Is there anything you can add to the testimony that was brought forward?

[Andrew Dickson]

Our council has always supported the formation of the proposed agency. If we had it in place, it would have provided some funds for us to come up with some innovative ways to improve our security, for example, through the research component of it. It will also provide some assurance of funding for our national organization through tough times as well. We're a supporter of the proposed program.

We're already paying the U.S. to have a similar program in place, because when we export product to the U.S., they have a national check-off that is in place already.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. de Bruyn, I don't want to leave you out. Did you have anything to add to that? I'll give you a chance to put your voice on the record.

[John de Bruyn]

On the last issue, we certainly agree with Manitoba that it's important to have a national agency. I think, as an issue of equity and fairness, since product going to the U.S. pays the fee, there should be a reciprocal agreement coming this way. Nationally they have a great plan on what to use those funds for, so we're in support.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

When you look at our efforts with the international community, you see we now have that agreement with the United States about zoning and so on, and of course there were, I think, those discussions in Paris. Is there anything further that you would like to see happen on the international scene in terms of co-operation, like a freer passing of information, etc.?

[John de Bruyn]

I'll take your last comment about backyard-raised pigs. It's a plausible scenario that in British Columbia, the farm-raised pigs could maybe be the place where ASF lands in this country. The zoning issue would be the most important next step. That would put the whole country off the market for a predetermined amount of time.

The U.S. has already said that if we isolated it to a certain part of this country, we could have access again. But just envision Japan or some of our other largest markets not recognizing our zoning or our attempt to zone. That speaks to the traceability issue as well, that this whole country would be held hostage for a least a year, and possibly longer, if you look back to the mad cow case of 2013.

At that time, I think the question would then become, do we want an industry and at what size? I think a quick zoning recognition by other countries would give us the ability to rebuild this industry in a relatively short period, and we'd be the exporters that we'd like to be. A prolonged period of no access to international markets would force this country to rethink our position on pork production for the foreseeable—

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. de Bruyn.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. MacGregor.

Mr. Poissant, you have six minutes.

[Jean-Claude Poissant, Liberal, La Prairie, QC]

My thanks to the witnesses. I have a couple of quick questions for them.

The first is about research. How is it evolving? You are saying that the disease was detected a number of years ago and is known. Do the existing cases mean that the disease is progressing more quickly?

Which one of you could answer?

[Martin Pelletier]

What we know is that there is no treatment or vaccine for the disease. I was reading an article this week reporting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture—or was it an expert—is not expecting a vaccine to be available for at least five or six years. The challenge is that we are dealing with a DNA virus, which is therefore very complex. As for the other countries, I cannot tell you whether or not they have intensified their research in recent months, but they have not yet found a cure or vaccine, probably because of the complexity of the virus and the disease.

[Jean-Claude Poissant, Liberal, La Prairie, QC]

On another subject, Canada organized a first international forum on the ASF that welcomed 150 delegates from 15 countries. A map was submitted showing the countries where the disease is present, those where it is absent and those about which nothing is known. How can we find out whether a country is already infected but is not reporting it? Are there still countries where reporting the disease is not mandatory?

[Martin Pelletier]

Most countries in the world are members of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), which receives formal international reports. However, member countries remain free to decide whether or not to report cases that occur on their territory.

For example, North Korea is a member of the OIE, but has not yet reported any cases despite recent suspicions in several media reports that the disease has entered the country. For its part, China has just announced that it has reduced its hog herd by 22.3% between April 2018 and April 2019, while reporting only 130 cases to the OIE. However, we suspect that the actual number of cases in China is much higher.

So there is a problem with some countries not reporting their true situation and I think there is no easy solution to that.