Thank you, Mr. Anderson.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to participate in the discussion here this morning, at this committee. I thank all the committee members for attending and for agreeing to an emergency meeting.
Thank you to our witnesses, as well.
I was very happy to hear Dr. Kochhar state earlier—and I think it's important that Canadians know this—that it is not a food safety or a public health issue. This is an issue for the pork industry that affects our production. That's the issue we are dealing with, and not an issue of food safety.
I want to go over the protocol a bit.
Mr. Vielfaure, Mr. Rempel, and Mr. Pearce, all three of them, have facilities in my riding, and I am familiar with them. Actually, after Mr. Vielfaure's dad was done being an MLA in the province, he helped the boys, and there was the odd time or two, when I was in the industry, when his dad delivered piglets to my facilities, so I have some experience in the industry as well, having been a producer in the past.
We have very strict biosecurity standards in our industry in Manitoba, and that's something that you guys are always working to improve. My understanding is that when you take a load of piglets to the United States, you drop them off at a facility, at a farm, that is presumably virus-free. Your preference is to do what we did in the past, under the special trusted truck protocol: come to the border, seal those trailers, and take them directly to a certified washing station, where they are hot-washed, disinfected, and high-heat dried.
The protocol was changed in December. We had that protocol implemented in 2014, when we had an outbreak. It seems to have addressed that situation, and now, after that protocol was relaxed and changed, we have a flare-up of PED again.
The problem is this. When you deliver these pigs to a site in the States, your only point of contact is the rear gate of that trailer, and that's minimal contact. Then you drive straight back to the border, you get sealed, and you come back into Canada. When you are being forced to go to a truck wash facility in the United States that is not certified or regulated, they use a firehose approach without high heat; all they do is sprinkle it and rinse it out so it looks clean and satisfies the requirements at the border. As a result, you've really exposed yourself not only to recycled water, which is a common practice down there, but also to a site where all kinds of trailers come from industry and Iowa. We heard before, from the chief veterinary officer, that there is much more of an epidemic of PED in the United States. You've been on a site where there is contamination already, so all kinds of parts of that truck now get infected.
Is that the issue that we're talking about?