Thank you for that.
Thank you for this opportunity to appear before the House of Commons. Bill C-205 is very important for Canadian pork producers. My name is Rick Bergmann. I'm a producer from Manitoba, and today I'm joined by René Roy, a producer from Quebec.
The Canadian Pork Council’s on-farm program, called Canadian pork excellence, is based on HACCP principles. Food safety and biosecurity are all intertwined, and the adoption of stringent biosecurity protocols is a vital component of every producer’s plan to keep their animals healthy and safe.
Pork producers are investing significant amounts of money to improve infrastructure, including significant improvements in barns, traceability and measures to limit who can access a hog barn, all to improve biosecurity controls. At the end of the day, the focus is to keep animals safe.
Still, unauthorized entries onto our hog farms are one of the greatest threats to biosecurity. Over the past several years, as I'm sure is not new to you, we have seen an alarming increase in unauthorized entry on farms, with individuals illegally entering our barns and other farm properties. That is very disturbing. These incidents put us, animals, and the entire food supply at risk. The reason we have so many stringent controls over the access to our barns is to reduce the devastating risks that several diseases could have for the industry.
Using my own farm as an example, a disease like PED or PRRS would cost my farm, which is not a large farm, between $260,000 and $320,000, very significant money, a significant cost and detriment.
The most concerning is African swine fever, which is an industry-killing disease. The cost of responding to and recovering from an ASF outbreak would be measured in billions of dollars for all our producers combined. Biosecurity is our best defence against the disease, and unauthorized entries put us all at risk.
I invite René Roy, my colleague, to say a few words at this time.