Yes, thanks very much, and I will just echo exactly what you said. There's no doubt that the last eight weeks.... I talk to food companies every day and the commitment that the workers have made, not just to their companies but to Canadians, is really moving.
As for what we need to do going forward, I think the first thing that struck me when the pandemic started was the fact that we had absolutely no plan for the food system. It's clear that measures had to be taken to address the pandemic, and I don't question those. One of those measures was essentially turning off the economy, if you will, but we didn't have a plan for what we were going to do with critical infrastructure. So we have to do that and this can't just be a lip-service activity. We actually have to sit down and start to map out what the food system looks like, from farms—including inputs to farms—all the way to retail and food service, so that we really start to identify where the weak links are.
Absolutely, there are about 10 different sectors in food manufacturing, with the obvious ones being meat, bakery and dairy. The level of concentration in each is very different. Where they're located across the country is also very different, and I think we do need to take a look so we've got a good understanding of what the sectors look like. You know, we're private companies. There's not a lot we can do in terms of collaborating and cooperating, but I think we can prepare, and if we understand better what we look like and how we're organized, I think that will help us.
Another thing we absolutely have to do—it was a problem before—is innovate. As an industry, we're the largest manufacturing sector in the country, but we lag behind most other manufacturing sectors when it comes to innovation and automation, those sorts of things.
What role they could play going forward is hard to know, but we're going to have to take a look at that. One thing we're going to have to start doing, that we probably wouldn't have thought about before the pandemic, is to really think about how we lay out our food plants.
It's not as though in six months' time we can go back to how things were. We are going to be looking at social distancing for a long time. We didn't build our food plants to accommodate social distancing; we built them to accommodate food safety. Now we're going to have to go in, because this is going to change how we look at things....
That's going to mean a lot of capital investment on the part of companies. That also may require support. You know, it's hard. If you think about Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, I think they have about 4,000 very loyal employees. Maybe about 50 of them focus on food and beverage manufacturing. In ISED, it's maybe four people. Again, they're incredibly smart and incredibly dedicated, but we need to amp that up.
If we're really serious about the food system, from both a food security standpoint and from the standpoint of the economic contribution and our export opportunity, we now have to start putting our money where our mouth is, and I don't think we always did that before.