I would say that the technology is there, but it's also for us—and “us” being the food inspection agency, the industry, and our colleagues at Agriculture Canada—to make use of that.
One of the key areas—and you made reference to the TB—is traceability, but it also came up relative to the BSE incident back in 2003.
For example, right now in Canada we do not yet have full traceability, whether it's with the ear tags or not. Recently we had the Canadian Meat Council, the Canadian Pork Council, as well as the Canadian cattlemen, all in together to have a conversation on the next steps on traceability for cattle and other animals. The key thing is that we need to use technology to answer some of the questions you've just asked.
One of the questions that the industry puts on the table often is that there is a cost, and who is going to pay for it. Then you have producers and packers in the room as well, so there is a conversation.
The idea would be, though, that technology is allowing us to do more now than we've ever been able to do. I know that the food inspection agency very much wants to have an innovative agenda to look at new ways of doing things, and given that we export 50% of everything we produce in Canada, it's incumbent upon us to take on this technology.
We do have an innovation renewal group within the agency to look at that. I think it won't move at the pace that perhaps everybody would want it to, but definitely using technology like e-certification on certificates and finding different ways of doing traceability, yes, we are looking at that.