Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for helping guide this committee through this issue.
I will direct my first question to the CFIA. I'm hoping the CFIA will help this committee walk through this process.
The fields where the potato wart was recently detected were already under management plan regulations, so those potatoes were already ineligible for export to the United States and to the rest of Canada.
I'm hoping you can walk us through the metrics that are put into place that will lead to a suspension order for exports. If those potatoes were already under a management plan, they were not going to be exported. They were not in any danger of infecting other jurisdictions. Is it a single detection of potato wart that leads to an entire province-wide ban? Is CFIA not able to employ traceability methods and cauterize a wound and isolate a single farm? Can you just help the committee understand why detections in fields that were not eligible for export led to an entire province-wide ban? What metrics are in place that help you extrapolate to “This is a wider problem”? Can you just help us understand that, please?