Thank you very much.
I think this is the first time the Fisheries Council of Canada, and in fact the seafood industry, has been invited to this committee, and we're very, very thankful for it.
I noted Gordon's comment that the government is basically advocating eating less food, but what it really is trying to communicate is eating healthier food. I assume that's why you've invited the seafood industry here today.
In any event, what I thought I'd do is give you a short oversight of the Fisheries Council of Canada. We've been around this town for a long time. We started in 1915 and in 1945 we changed our name to the Fisheries Council of Canada. Our association has members from coast to coast, right from British Columbia to Nunavut. Our companies are primarily what we call vertically integrated. That means they have their own harvesting vessels, they have their own processing, and most of them are doing their own marketing.
We're also very happy that, as part of our membership, we have what we call fishermen's co-operatives. Fishermen's co-operatives are simply fishermen who have fishing licences issued by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but they've gone a step forward and basically either built or invested in their own processing plants. We are very pleased that they're part of our organization.
I also want to talk about the indigenous situation. Of course, that's quite important these days. We had a significant Supreme Court ruling in 1999 that basically defined indigenous fishing rights. Since then, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and our industry, the Fisheries Council of Canada, have been adjusting to that. I can say right now, in terms of British Columbia, 30% of the fishing licences given by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are given to indigenous people. We're happy, as the Fisheries Council of Canada, the leading seafood organization in Canada, that three Inuit members in Nunavut are members of the Fisheries Council of Canada, as is the only indigenous company in Labrador. That's just a bit of a capsule of that.
In terms of our industry—I imagine you focus much more on agriculture than you do on seafood, and that's understandable—we're an $8-billion industry, and $6 billion of that goes into exports outside of Canada. We are now the eighth largest seafood exporter in the world. In terms of Canada, we are the highest export-oriented food sector in Canada.
To comment on food policy, what the Fisheries Council of Canada and the seafood industry are really focused on is food safety. I know you have three other elements, but food safety is one that we feel most comfortable dealing with. I have to say we have our credentials on that because the seafood industry of Canada was the first food sector to adopt mandatory HACCP as food safety requirements, and that was in 1992. Basically what we've been trying to do is make sure that type of food safety regime goes across Canada.
In terms of food policy, I'll pick up on a note that Gordon mentioned in terms of having a national food safety regime that is a HACCP-based regime. I say national because that's different than federal, provincial, and municipal, and it's important that we have a national regime as opposed to just simply a federal. A federal regime basically only applies to a company that's processing in Toronto that exports its production into another province or overseas. In Canada, this is a particularly important issue. That's simply because, if you look at a city such as Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal, you can have a fairly substantive food processing company in Toronto just basically selling its products in Ontario, and it doesn't have to be federally registered. It can be provincially or municipally registered. That is a deficiency in our food safety regime.
That is also a deficiency of which other nations take note. Fortunately, if you want to be in fishing industry processing, you have to be part of the mandatory HACCP program. There's no loophole in that.
I think we have to be careful about our definitions, and we're talking nationally, not just for CFIA. It's going to be a hard negotiation. I press you to move in that direction.
The other thing in terms of HACCP is this: don't give any exemptions. There is no question: if this rolls out across the country, you're going to get people or companies coming in and saying that it's going to be costly and all that sort of stuff. In 1992 we established our HACCP program. There's no question that there were small, medium-sized, and large companies that were part of it. It was all mandatory.
We worked with the small companies. Funnily enough, what we found was that the small companies had probably the easiest transition into the HACCP program, because what you have to identify is a critical control point. What part of your processing is going to be a potential significant health problem? In a small company, you pretty well know it. If you don't know it, you shouldn't be in the food industry. For example, in the fisheries, often that one critical point was probably just in terms of the fish being entered into the company.
So I'm saying no exemptions, and the next item I'm going to focus on is that basically in the seafood industry and the food industry, some food-processing jobs are unattractive.